HowLongToBeat: The Game

About HowLongToBeat: The Game

HowLongToBeat is the long-running site where players log how many hours they spent on a game, and HowLongToBeat: The Game turns those numbers into a guessing game. It arrived on the site's /play page in April 2024 and runs in the browser, free with ads.

The daily mode is a set of three games, the same for everyone that day. For each game there are four questions: how long the main story takes, how long main plus extras takes, how long a completionist run takes, and what user rating the game has on a scale of 1 to 100 percent. Each answer is worth up to 25 points depending on how close you get, so a game is worth 100 and the whole day 300. Once per game you can use a power-up: Reveal shows one of the times outright, Probe colours your four answers by how close they are so you can adjust, and Spread shows how the three times relate to each other. The set resets at midnight UTC, and the result can be shared as a score with coloured squares.

Beside the daily there is a Random mode for extra rounds and a Custom mode for building a set to send to friends. It suits players who know their backlog by the hour and like an estimation puzzle more than a naming one: you always know the game, the question is how long it lasts.

How to play HowLongToBeat: The Game

1. Open howlongtobeat.com/play and start the daily challenge.
2. Look at the first game and enter your guess in hours for Main Story, Main + Extras and Completionist.
3. Guess its user rating as a percentage from 1 to 100.
4. If you want help, use one power-up for that game: Reveal, Probe or Spread.
5. Submit to see the real numbers and your points, up to 25 per answer.
6. Repeat for the other two games, then share your score out of 300.

Tips

• Keep the three times in order: Main + Extras is never shorter than Main Story, and Completionist is usually the longest by a wide margin for open-world games.
• Reveal is worth most on a game you barely know, since it gives you 25 points and an anchor for the other two times.
• Use Spread when you know roughly how long the story is but not whether completionist runs balloon, as in collectathons and RPGs.
• Short linear games and arcade titles often have times very close together; do not stretch them out of habit.
• Ratings for well-known games cluster in the 70s and 80s; move far from that only when you know the reception was unusual.

Questions