How to Play What's Your Guess? Rules, Verdicts and Streaks

What's Your Guess? asks you for numbers nobody knows offhand: how far, how many, how heavy, how long. Every question has a real answer worked out from published figures, and your job is to land near it. Not on it. Near it.

How near is the whole game. A guess within ten times the answer, too high or too low, keeps your run going. A guess further off than that ends it. Your score is how many questions you survive in a row. This guide walks through each screen of a run, from the first question to the share text at the end.

Each question sits on a card under a small label naming its subject. There are 16 of them: space; planet Earth; animals; the human body; food and drink; sports; music; movies, TV and games; history; money; technology and the internet; transport; cities and buildings; everyday life; world records; and science. The bank holds nearly 1,400 questions across them.

Many questions carry a short line underneath that pins down an assumption, such as which year the figure is from or what counts as "full". Read it. It often decides whether an answer is a thousand or a million.

The unit sits inside the answer box, beside where you type. Sometimes it is an ordinary unit like kilometres or days. Often it is something stranger, because a lot of questions compare one thing with another: an imaginary question might ask how many teaspoons of water fill a kitchen sink, and the box would say "teaspoons". Whatever the word, you only type the number.

The box understands numbers the way people write them: 1,200, 12k, 3.5 million, 2 billion or 6e9 all work. It also takes a sum, using +, -, ×, ÷ and brackets (on a keyboard, x or * works for times), so you can type your reasoning straight in, such as 8 billion × 0.3, and the box does the arithmetic.

Under the box a readout repeats what you have typed in words, with the unit, once the number is big or is a sum: type 45000000 and it reads "= 45 million", followed by the unit. It is the quickest way to catch a missing or extra zero before it costs you. If what you typed is not a number, a tag on the box says so: "Numbers only, like 1.2 million".

Beside the box is a calculator button. It opens a calculator with keys for thousand, million, billion and trillion, and a scratch pad for jotting down what you know as you go. There is no clock on any question, so take as long as you like. When you are ready, press Check estimate or Enter.

The answer comes up next to your guess, in two tiles: "You guessed" and "Answer". Under them, the game tells you how far off you were as a multiple, such as "1.6× too low" or "12× too high". A guess within 2% of the answer just says "Spot on".

Below that is a bar on a log scale, with the answer in the middle and your pin sliding out to where your guess landed. The bar is marked in multiples of the answer and cut into bands, and the band your pin stops in lights up. A wild guess runs off the end, and the whole bar stretches out to reach it.

At the foot of the card, How it adds up (Math, on a narrow screen) opens the working: a few short steps, usually three, with the figures filled in, then the sources each figure came from, linked so you can read them. This is the best part of the game to linger on. When you were far off, the working shows exactly which piece of the picture you had wrong.

Every guess is judged as a ratio to the answer, never as a gap. Being ten times too big costs the same as being ten times too small. Say the answer to a question is 4,000:

• Spot on: within a factor of 1.02, so roughly 3,920 to 4,080.
• Bullseye: within a factor of 1.1, so about 3,640 to 4,400.
• Close: within a factor of 2, so 2,000 to 8,000.
• In range: within a factor of 10, so 400 to 40,000. No label appears, the run simply goes on.
• Out: more than 10 times off, below 400 or above 40,000. The reveal adds "More than 10× off ends the run."

Bullseye and Close are worth a small cheer, and a Bullseye earns a little confetti, but they do not add anything to your score. Every guess inside the ten-times range counts exactly the same towards your streak.

The ratio rule is what makes the game fair across wildly different questions. An answer might be 6 or 6 trillion. Measured as a gap, a question about trillions would be impossible. Measured as a ratio, a guess that is three times too big is the same size of mistake whatever the question.

After each reveal, press Next question and the next one is already waiting. The header keeps count, "4 in a row", with a trail of coloured dots for your latest eight answers and, once you have a record, your best underneath: "Best 7 in a row".

Runs get harder as they go. The first 3 questions come from the easiest group, the next 5 from a harder one, and every question after that from the hardest. So the ninth question of a run is where it starts to bite.

A run never repeats a question, and the game skips the last 600 questions you have seen while others are available. If the page reloads mid-run, which phones like to do to tabs in the background, the run picks up where it was in the same tab for up to 12 hours, with a note under the box: "Picked up where you left off".

A miss ends the run, and Next becomes See your run. The last screen counts your streak up, "6 questions in a row", and says "New best" if you have beaten your record. Under it are two figures, your best run and your closest guess of the run, and then every question you answered with how far off each guess was.

Play again starts a fresh run at once. Share copies a short summary that leaves out the questions, since everyone is dealt different ones:

• A first line with the name and your streak, like "What's Your Guess? 🧮 6 in a row".
• A line per question with its multiple: 🎯 for a Bullseye, 📐 for Close, 🔭 for in range and ❌ for the miss that ended it. A long run shows its last ten.
• A link inviting friends to beat your streak.

If you ever answer every question the game has, the run ends there instead, under "Every question answered", and the next run starts with the questions you saw longest ago.

Your best streak is kept on your device, or on your account if you sign in, in which case it follows you to any device you sign in on. There is no leaderboard and no ranking against other players: the record is kept for you alone. The game is free and needs no sign-up to play.

Play one run without the calculator, just to see where your instincts are. Then play one where you break every question into pieces before you type. The difference is usually the whole lesson. When you want the method in detail, read how to get better at estimating, and keep a few numbers worth knowing in your head for the questions where you have nothing else to go on.