Guess the Chain

About Guess the Chain

Guess the Chain is a browser game built on one question: can you recognise a chain from nothing but its dots on a map? Each day the US edition shows a numbered map with a red dot for every location of one chain. It might be a fast food restaurant, a supermarket, a gas station, a bank or a gym, and some chains cover the whole country while others never leave one state.

You type a chain name and get six guesses, and close spellings are accepted. After a wrong guess the game marks whether your chain is the same kind of business, a similar one or a different one, whether the mystery chain has more or fewer locations, and how much the two maps overlap. A Compare button draws your guess's stores in blue over the mystery map. If you are stuck you can ask for clues one at a time: the category, the number of locations, the year it was founded, its headquarters state and its first letter. The shared result shows how many clues you used without giving the answer away.

It plays like Worldle or Globle, but the thing you are placing is a business rather than a country. Store locations come from the public All the Places data set, with gaps filled from OpenStreetMap and Overture Maps, and the site has 549 US chains to draw from. Separate UK and Canada editions have their own daily maps and chain lists.

Past maps can be played from the archive, where each map also has a page with its clues and answer, and a practice mode gives extra maps beyond the daily one. There are also chain map pages that show where every store of a well known chain is, state by state. It needs no account, and stats are kept in the browser. It suits anyone who has driven past a lot of American storefronts and likes geography games.

How to play Guess the Chain

1. Open guessthechain.com and look at the day's map, which shows every US location of the mystery chain as a red dot.
2. Type the name of a chain you think it is and press Guess. Close spellings are matched to the nearest chain.
3. Read the feedback: a tick, an approximately sign or a cross for the kind of business, an up or down arrow for the store count, and the percentage of map overlap.
4. Press Compare to draw your guess's stores in blue over the mystery map and see where they differ.
5. Press Get a clue when stuck to reveal the category, store count, founding year, headquarters state or first letter, one at a time.
6. Name the chain within six guesses, then share your result or play past maps from the archive.

Screenshots

Tips

• Look at where the dots stop: a chain that never crosses into the West or stays in one state narrows the list fast.
• Use your first guess on a chain with a broad footprint in the same region, so the store count arrow and overlap tell you more.
• A tick on category means the same kind of business, such as both fast food, so keep your next guesses in that group.
• Clues are counted in your shared result, so try a couple of guesses before asking for one.

Questions