The rules, in about three minutes

How a round goes

You see a photograph of a dish, its ingredients and a short description. You pick a country. If you are right, the reveal tells you what the dish is, where it comes from and who took the photo.

If you are wrong, three pieces of feedback arrive at once. The compass needle points from your guess towards the correct country — the same direction you would trace on a world map when you say that Japan is east of Hungary. The needle colour encodes distance: ember orange within 500 km, freezing blue when you are on the other side of the planet. And if the country you picked borders the right answer, we say so explicitly.

What counts as neighbouring

A real land border, first of all. But islands make that rule insufficient on its own: countries in the Caribbean or the Persian Gulf often sit within 200 kilometres of each other without sharing a border, and treating them as strangers would be absurd. So any pair within 200 km counts as neighbouring too.

Distant maritime pairs do not. Japan and Korea are roughly 900 kilometres apart, which is not neighbouring in any useful sense, and the hint will not pretend otherwise.

Scoring

A solo round is worth up to 1,000 points. The score derives from the distance of your best guess and decays continuously rather than in steps — it roughly halves every 1,400 kilometres. That is deliberate: someone who did not find the country but reasoned their way to the right region still scores, because a good instinct is knowledge rather than luck.

Each additional guess costs 120 points. The first one is free, so getting it right immediately costs you nothing.

Rooms work differently, because there the question is who gets there first. A round opens at 2,000 points, time erodes it continuously, and every wrong guess costs 200. Without that penalty the optimal strategy would be to click through five countries in the first two seconds, which would reward fast fingers instead of good guesses.

Game modes

There are three ways in: 1,484 foods — 344 of which are desserts, playable as their own mode — and 339 drinks. Within drinks you can choose alcoholic, non-alcoholic or mixed rounds.

Solo play is unlimited and works without an account. Multiplayer rooms need one: you open a room, share its code, and everyone guesses the same round at the same time. Round length and round count belong to whoever created the room.

Frequently asked questions

Is FoodGuess free?

Yes. Solo play is unlimited and free, and works without registering. An account is needed for multiplayer rooms and the monthly leaderboard.

Do I need an account?

Not to play on your own. You do need one to create a room, join someone else’s room, or appear on the monthly leaderboard.

How many dishes are in the game?

Currently 1,823 items drawn from the cuisines of 197 countries: 1,484 foods and 339 drinks. Within the foods, 344 count as desserts and can be played as a separate mode. The bank keeps growing.

Where do the photos come from?

Wikimedia Commons, together with author and licence data. Every photo used is listed with its creator, licence and source on the Credits page — a legal requirement of the CC BY and CC BY-SA licences rather than a courtesy.

How does multiplayer work?

You open a room and share its six-character code. Anyone who enters it gets the same rounds, and you all guess live at the same time. The host sets round length and how many rounds to play.

Can I stream it?

Yes — rooms were built for exactly that, so viewers can enter the code and play along with you. Approved Kick and Twitch streamers get unlimited multiplayer access.

What do the compass colours mean?

Distance from the correct country. Ember orange under 500 km, amber to 1,500 km, yellow to 3,000 km, then progressively colder blues — the freezing violet-blue means you are more than 10,000 kilometres away.