How expensive? roughly.

How expensive? is one of the daily guessing games from roughly., a small site from Hired Hands Games where every game asks for an estimate rather than an exact answer. In this one you guess prices, and the place and the date are part of the question. A pound of bananas in the United States this year costs something very different from a loaf of bread in Britain in 1800.

Each day brings five rounds, the same for every player, and the header counts the days. The items are ordinary things such as milk, tea, bananas, petrol, a haircut or a unit of household electricity, each with a quantity, a country or city and a month or year. A few rounds reach far back, to prices from Diocletian's edict of 301 in Rome. You drag a price line up or down a scale that runs from cents to tens of dollars, or type the amount, and you can switch the display to another currency.

After you lock it in, the game shows the real price beside yours, how many times off you were, a dot cloud of other players' guesses and the share of players you beat. It names the statistics office behind each price, such as the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the UK Office for National Statistics, Statistics Canada, INSEE or Statistik Austria. At the end you get your average factor across the five rounds, a streak flame and a card to share.

Today's rounds are free and need no account. The archive keeps every past day, with one archive day free each day and the rest opened by roughly+ for a one-off $4.99. You can challenge a friend or play live with friends or in a chat, in English or German. Outside the EU and Switzerland the site loads Google ads, which roughly+ turns off.