The game, and why this exists
One person thinks of an animal. Everyone else has to work out what it is by asking questions that can only be answered yes or no. It costs nothing, needs no equipment, and fills a car journey better than almost anything else.
How to play
One player picks an animal and keeps it to themselves. The others take turns asking questions, and the picker can only answer yes or no. Traditionally you get twenty questions before you have to commit to a guess, though nobody has ever counted properly.
The trick is asking questions that split the field roughly in half rather than questions that just check a hunch. Is it a lion? eliminates one animal. Is it a carnivore? eliminates about half of them. Good openers, roughly in order of how much they narrow things down:
- Is it a mammal?
- Does it live in water?
- Is it bigger than a dog?
- Does it eat meat?
- Would you find one in Britain?
- Could you keep one as a pet?
- Does it have more than four legs?
The endgame is the fun part. Once you know it is a nocturnal African carnivore that lives in groups, you are choosing between about four animals, and someone always confidently picks the wrong one.
Why the site exists
Because the game keeps stopping. Someone picks a pangolin, someone else asks whether it is nocturnal, and the person who chose it has no idea. Out come the phones, and five minutes later everyone is reading different Wikipedia articles and arguing about whether a pangolin counts as armoured.
This site is the fix. Type the animal, get the answers to the questions people actually ask, on one screen, in about four seconds. It is for the person who picked the animal and needs to answer honestly, and for settling arguments afterwards.
It is deliberately not a solver. Nothing here guesses the animal for you, and there is no mode that plays against you. That would ruin the only good part of the game.
Where the answers come from
The photographs and the one-line summaries come from Wikipedia, fetched live when you look an animal up.
Everything in Quick answers and At a glance is written by hand, because the questions people ask in this game are not the ones reference books answer. No database has a field for would people eat this or could you keep one. Those are judgement calls, which means some of them are arguable and a few are probably wrong.
Some are genuinely ambiguous rather than mistaken. A hedgehog is a common pet in some countries and illegal in others. Plenty of animals are eaten somewhere. Where an honest answer is it depends, the site says can be, sometimes or in places instead of pretending to be certain.
Found something wrong?
Wrong photo, wrong fact, or an animal that should be here and is not: please say. It takes ten seconds and it is the fastest way this gets better.
The small print
The site is free, has no accounts, and sets no cookies. It does not track you. If you send a report it stores what you typed and nothing about who you are. Adverts may appear here at some point to cover the costs, and if they do they will not be allowed to get in the way of the answers.
It is an early, ongoing project made for fun, so expect it to keep changing.