How to play

Every day there is one puzzle, the same one for everybody. It opens on a heavily zoomed crop of a company logo — often just a few percent of it, sometimes a flat field of a single colour.

You have 6 guesses. Each wrong one zooms out a step and unlocks a sourced fact about the company. The bar under the window counts guesses, not letters: the answer can be any length.

All 6 facts are shown when the game ends, however it ends. There is nothing to be gained by spending guesses to collect them.

Guess count dominates. A fast solve on the fifth guess never beats a slow one on the fourth — the gap between guess tiers is always larger than the whole time bonus, which is deliberate.

On top of that, a time bonus of up to 50 points, tapering to nothing over 3 minutes. Timing is measured on the server from the moment you press start, not from when the page loaded — reading the lobby costs you nothing.

A streak counts consecutive days played, not days solved. Miss a day and it resets; lose a puzzle and it survives. The game is meant to be hard at the first stage, and a streak that broke on a loss would punish exactly the people it should be encouraging.

Each day of a streak adds 2% to your score, up to 50% at 25 days. There is a separate win streak, which counts consecutive solves and does break on a loss.

Streaks and the leaderboard need an account. You can play without one, and your score still appears — it just does not rank, and it is gone at midnight.

Case, spacing, punctuation and accents are all ignored, & is read as “and”, and company suffixes like Inc or Ltd are stripped. A single-character typo is forgiven, including two letters transposed. Two mistakes is a different word, and often a different company.

What is not accepted is a guess carrying extra words. “Bisquick” is right; “Bisquick pancake mix” is not. There is no way to tell a player naming the brand from one naming something else that merely contains it — and for brands whose names are ordinary words, that is most of the neighbourhood rather than an edge case.

Common alternative names are accepted where they have been added by hand. There is no autocomplete: a list of candidates would give away the answer space.

The puzzle changes at midnight US Eastern, wherever you are. One play per person per day, and the archive opens a puzzle up the day after it runs — with the answer, the facts and how everyone did.

Browse past puzzles

Exprand records how much of a logo people need before they recognise it: which stage the answer landed on, and how long it took. That is the point of the game rather than a side effect of it, and it is why the reveal window is the same size on a phone and a desktop — a bigger render of the same crop is easier to solve, and the numbers would end up measuring screen size instead of brand recognition.

What is stored, and for how long, is set out in the privacy policy.