How to play FoodGuessr

FoodGuessr is a daily country quiz built around a plate of food. You get a photograph, an ingredient list, and a short description. You name the country. A day is 3 rounds, 5 guesses each, and a perfect card is 15,000 points.

What you see at the start of a round

The photograph is the main clue. Sauces, breads, noodles, and garnishes narrow a continent faster than the dish name would. The ingredient line is specific on purpose: tamarind and fish sauce, pork bones and wheat noodles, corn tortillas with pineapple. The description tells you the method (simmered, cured in citrus, laminated, fried in batter) and withholds the place.

The name is covered until you miss 2 times. After that, the name is a hint, not the answer. Ramen still has to be placed. A croissant still has to be placed. Knowing the dish and knowing the country are different skills, which is why the name arrives late.

Guesses, compass, warmth

Type at least two letters and pick a country from the list. There are 5 guesses. A repeat country is blocked. If the pick is wrong, the round shows three facts:

• The initial bearing from your country toward the answer, written as N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W, or NW, and drawn as an arrow.
• The great-circle distance in kilometres.
• A warmth word for that distance.

Distance uses the haversine formula on a sphere with radius 6,371 km. That radius is the conventional mean Earth radius in geodesy (NASA lists a mean radius of about 6,371 km). Each country is represented by one interior point. It is not the capital, and it is not the nearest border, so a guess that shares a frontier can still read as a few hundred kilometres.

How the 5,000 points are split

A correct answer on the first guess scores the full 5,000. Every extra guess you needed removes 1,000. Guess 2 is worth 4,000 before any rebate. Guess 3 is worth 3,000. Guess 4 is worth 2,000. Guess 5 is worth 1,000. Five misses score 0 and the country is shown.

Close misses pay some of that cost back. For each wrong guess the round adds 600 times a closeness fraction: 1 minus the distance divided by 8,000 km, and never below 0. The rebate is rounded to the nearest point. The round is then capped at 5,000, so a lucky first guess cannot go past a perfect score, and a pile of near misses cannot either.

Worked example, computed from the same function the game uses. Suppose the answer is Japan and the first guess is Thailand. That miss is 4,325 km, which this scale calls Warm. Getting the country right on the next guess scores 4,276: a 4,000 base, plus the rebate for that one miss, still under the 5,000 cap.

What the other modes ask

Classic is the country hunt above. The same three dishes are served to everyone on your local date. The date rolls over at midnight on your device, and the streak counts consecutive local dates on which you finish Classic.

Cuisine Match flips the question. The country is printed in large type and you pick which of four photographed dishes belongs to it. Eight rounds, 1,000 points each. A wrong pick shows the right plate before the next country.

Plate-Off puts two dishes side by side and asks which one has the higher score on a fixed editorial sheet from 0 to 100. The sheet does not change during the day, and it is not a poll of players. Five pairs, 1,000 points for the higher score.

Guess the food by emoji drops the photograph. You read a short emoji row left to right and choose the dish name. Eight rounds, 1,000 points each. The row on the homepage (pancakes and maple) is an illustration. It is not in the daily pool.

Clues that survive a blurry photo

Starch is the fastest split. Wheat noodles in an opaque broth, rice noodles in a clear broth, short-grain rice in a wide pan, and corn tortillas are four different maps. If the starch is rice and the fat is butter and cream, you are usually in a curry family rather than a noodle soup.

Acid and garnish do the next cut. Citrus poured over raw fish is not the same dish as citrus on the side of fried fish. Peanuts crushed over noodles point at a tamarind stir-fry. An egg set on rice with chili paste is a different plate from an egg set in pork broth. Pineapple against seasoned pork on a corn tortilla is a narrower clue than “taco”.

Some plates travel, and the game still needs a single answer. The butter croissant is the clearest case. A crescent of enriched dough was baked in Vienna as kipferl long before Paris laminated it with butter in the 19th century. This game files the butter-laminated bakery form with France, because that is the version the photograph shows: visible sheets of dough, not a denser sweet roll. If you guess Austria you will get a bearing toward France, not a lecture. The same rule covers the rest of the catalog. One dish, one country, written on the dish itself.

Feijoada is the other useful argument. Black beans with salted pork show up in Portugal and in several Atlantic countries. The plate in this game includes orange slices with the beans, which is the Brazilian service, so the answer is Brazil. Read the whole ingredient line before you lock a guess. The optional items are often the ones that move the pin.

A practical order of operations

Name the starch, then the protein, then the sour or fermented note. Only then open the country box. If two countries still fit, pick the one you can defend from the garnish, not the one you ate most recently. A wrong continent is expensive: the rebate hits zero at 8,000 km, and a lot of ocean crossings are longer than that. A wrong neighbor is cheap, and the compass tells you which way to walk.

Save the name reveal. Two deliberate misses are better than five panicked ones, but the first guess is the only one worth 5,000. If the ingredient line already names a technique you know (beer batter and peas, saffron rice and mussels, pork bones simmered until white), spend the first guess. If you only know the continent, guess a large country in that direction and let the compass correct you. The second guess is still worth 4,000 plus whatever the first miss refunds.

Scores stay on this device. There is no account. Finishing Classic on consecutive local dates raises the streak by one. Skipping a date resets it to one the next time you finish. Cuisine Match, Plate-Off, and the emoji mode each record that you finished them today. They do not change the Classic streak.

Questions