How Close
Guess the number. No calculator, no lifeline, just your instinct for scale.
Ten questions, each one a real quantity, and one guess apiece. There is no multiple choice to hide behind — you type a number and find out how far off you were.
Scoring is by ratio rather than by difference, which is the only fair way to do it. Being a hundred out on the number of bones in a body is a wild miss; being a hundred out on the distance to the Moon in kilometres is a bullseye. Get within about double or half the real figure and you will score well.
The questions are drawn at random from a pool of more than a hundred, so playing again is a different game rather than the same one with the answers already known.
How it works
- Read the question and commit to a number. One guess, no going back.
- Closer is better, and closeness is measured by ratio, not by how many units you missed by.
- The real figure and your gap are shown straight after, with where the number comes from.
- Ten rounds, getting further from everyday scale as you go.
Common questions
- How exactly is a guess scored?
- By the ratio between your guess and the real figure, not the difference. Exactly right is 100. Out by a factor of two — double or half — is about 70. Out by a factor of ten is zero. This is the only way to score estimates across wildly different scales fairly: a hundred-unit miss means something completely different on a question about bones than on one about kilometres to the Sun.
- Some of these numbers are disputed. Which one do you use?
- The figure quoted in the explanation after each round, which is the commonly published one. Population, the number of islands in Indonesia and the count of a body’s muscles are all genuinely contested, and the explanation says so where it matters. A round is scored against the stated figure rather than against a claim that no other figure is defensible.
- Do I get the same questions if I play again?
- Almost certainly not. Ten rounds are drawn at random from a pool of more than a hundred, so a second run is a different game. If you share your result, though, whoever opens the link gets your exact ten in your exact order — the selection travels in the link.
- Can I use a calculator?
- You can, and it will not help much. Almost nothing here is calculable from the question — it is recall and reasoning about scale. The two or three rounds that are arithmetic are in the warm-up on purpose.
These are published reference figures, rounded where rounding is honest — population counts, astronomical distances and biological averages all move depending on who measured them and when. A round is scored against the figure quoted in its explanation, not against a claim that the figure is the only defensible one. This is a game about intuition for scale, and it measures nothing about you beyond how well you guessed today.
Okay, now pick another
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