How to play Worml

You are shown an animal. Work out which countries it is native to by guessing countries on a globe that tells you how close you are.

The basic loop

Type a country, or tap one on the globe, and submit it. Every guess is coloured by how far it is from the animal's nearest native country — deep blue on the far side of the planet, through pale, into orange and red when you are one border away. Guess a country the animal actually lives in and it turns green.

The card above the globe tells you how many native countries you need. For narrow-range species that is all of them; for wide-ranging ones like the grey wolf you need a majority of a representative list, and any listed country counts.

What each guess tells you

Colour is never the only signal, because colour alone fails for anyone who cannot easily distinguish it. Every guess also carries:

• a warmth word — Freezing, Cold, Cool, Warm, Hot, Burning;
• a percentage, where 100% is a native country and 0% is the furthest any country on Earth is from this animal's range;
• a rank against your own guesses, so you can see which one got closest;
• the distance in kilometres;
• a compass arrow pointing toward the nearest part of the range.

That arrow is the most underused clue in the game. Two guesses on opposite sides of a continent will point at each other, and where those directions cross is roughly where the animal lives.

Scoring

Every round starts at 1,000 points. Hits are free — only misses cost you, and the cost depends on how cold the guess was: roughly 20 points for a bordering country, up to 80 for the opposite side of the world. Each guess shows what it cost.

Because hits are free, a flawless round is 1,000 whether the animal lives in one country or nine. That is deliberate: it makes scores comparable regardless of which animal came up, so the number measures how efficiently you narrowed it down rather than how forgiving the day's range happened to be. Revealing the answer scores nothing.

A strategy that works

Opening with a country on each major landmass costs little and eliminates most of the planet. Because the percentage is normalised per animal, a first guess reading 40% is genuinely mid-range rather than merely far — the scale always uses its full span. Once two guesses bracket a region, follow the arrows inward rather than guessing neighbours at random; each border you cross is worth more information than another country in the same cluster.

Daily, practice and Worm Wednesday

Daily is the same animal for everyone and changes at your local midnight. It is the only mode that counts toward your statistics and streak. Practice is unlimited and never affects them.

Every Wednesday the daily animal is something long and legless — a worm, snake, caterpillar, legless lizard or eel. Practice keeps drawing from the ordinary roster that day.

Play today's puzzle →