Faff About

Outdo

One figure showing, one hidden. Say which way it goes, then do it again.

A tie counts as correct. Pick a pack below to play classic, or play today’s daily.

The nine packs

In 1974 Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman asked people a higher or lower question. A wheel of fortune numbered from 0 to 100, quietly rigged to stop on 10 or on 65, was spun in front of them. They were asked whether the percentage of African countries in the United Nations was higher or lower than the number it landed on, and then for their own estimate. The people who saw 10 guessed 25 per cent, by the median. The people who saw 65 guessed 45. A number everyone in the room knew to be random moved the answer by twenty points.

Outdo is that experiment with the rigging taken out. The figure on the board is not random. It is a real number about a real thing, and it is the only honest clue you get.

The known card does the work

A figure on its own is nearly impossible to judge. Ask someone for a number and it arrives with a shrug attached; ask whether it is more or less than a number they have just been shown, and the shrug goes. People are good at comparison and poor at absolute estimation, which is why the game never asks for a number. It asks for a direction.

That is also why it is harder than it sounds. The known figure is an anchor in exactly the sense the wheel was, and an anchor pulls. The closer two things feel, the more the number on show drags the guess towards itself, and the near miss is where that pull shows. A run rarely ends on a pair that was obviously lopsided. It ends on the pair that felt like a coin toss and was not one.

It is also why every pack is held to the same two-part bar. The things in it have to be recognisable on sight, and people have to hold some intuition about them without knowing the number. The first part stops the game being a vocabulary test. The second part is the game: a pair of strangers is a coin toss, a pair you know by heart is a formality, and the rounds worth playing sit in between, where you have a feeling and no figure to check it against.

Two ways to play, after different things

Classic is a measure of how far a run of good judgement goes before one bad call arrives. Nothing caps it, so the only score worth comparing is your own previous best, and the instant restart is there because the next run is always the interesting one.

The daily turns the same skill into something you can compare with someone else. Everyone is dealt the same cards, whatever their time zone, and a shared result shows the shape of a day — where it went right, and where a close one got you — without ever saying which cards were dealt. It is the one part of the site built to be talked about, and it gives nothing away to the person you send it to.

Neither mode keeps a leaderboard, and nothing here ranks you against a stranger. It is a game for five minutes, not a hobby, and it is built so nobody is tempted to make it one.

Questions

How long does a run last?
Classic has no round limit, so a run lasts exactly as long as you keep answering correctly, and your first wrong answer ends it. The daily is ten rounds, played out in full: a wrong answer costs a point, not the day.
What counts as a near miss?
A wrong answer that was close. Each pack sets its own idea of close, because a percentage means nothing on a date: within 2 years on Who is older, within 10% on Box office, within 10% on TV episodes, within 10% on UK house prices, within 10% on Stadium capacity, within 10% on Population, within 10% on Mountain height, within 10% on River length and within 3 years on Which came first. It is still a wrong answer: it ends a classic run like any other, and in the daily it costs the point and shows amber rather than red when you share.
Do I need an account to keep my streak?
No, and there is no way to make one. Your streak, your finished dailies and your best classic run on each pack are kept in this browser’s own storage and nowhere else, because there is no server to send them to. That has a cost worth knowing: clearing site data, switching browsers or playing in a private window starts again from nothing, and Safari can clear it for a site you have not visited in seven days.
Where do the numbers come from?
From public datasets whose licences allow this use, and every figure is fetched from its source rather than typed in. Each pack’s page ends with its receipt: the source, the licence, the day the figures were retrieved and how often they are refreshed. If a number looks wrong, that block is where to start checking it.
Can I play it without JavaScript?
You can read all of it — every pack’s rules, sources and questions — because each page is built as HTML before anything runs. Guessing needs JavaScript, since there is no server to send a guess to.