About

A daily guessing game with seven kinds of answer, built to be played in three minutes and shared in one line.

How a puzzle is chosen

Each game has a pool of answers. Every answer is used once before any of them come round again, and each pass through the pool is reshuffled, so a second year is not a repeat of the first in the same order. Three of the seven games run on any given day, and the slots are shared out in proportion to pool size so no game runs dry ahead of the others.

Not every entry can be the answer. A puzzle nobody can name is not a puzzle, so answers are drawn from a smaller set chosen for how widely known they are. For cities that is measured by how many Wikipedia language editions carry an article, which turns out to track fame far better than population does.

Where the data comes from

• Countries: mledoze/countries with populations from Wikidata.
• Cities, mountains, paintings and dog breeds: Wikidata.
• Elements: a public domain periodic table dataset.
• Animals: curated by hand, because no open dataset carries weight, diet and habitat together.

Photographs

Every photograph is openly licensed, either CC0, public domain or CC BY. Nothing is share alike. Where a credit is required it appears in the corner of the picture, and the full list is kept with the source.

No maps

The country game never draws a border, an outline or a globe with landmasses on it. A country is shown by a landmark or a landscape instead. Borders are disputed in enough places that any map is a claim, and this game has no reason to make one.

Who runs it

One independent developer makes and runs Guess the Thing, working alone rather than as a company. They decide what the site does with data, which today is close to nothing, and they read what arrives at the address below.

Write to hello@griddle.games about anything: a wrong answer, a puzzle that will not load, a photograph whose licence needs correcting, or how the site handles data.