The game, and why this exists
One person thinks of an animal. Everyone else has to work out what it is by asking questions that can only be answered yes or no. It costs nothing, needs no equipment, and fills a car journey better than almost anything else.
How to play
One player picks an animal and keeps it to themselves. The others take turns asking questions, and the picker can only answer yes or no. Traditionally you get twenty questions before you have to commit to a guess, though nobody has ever counted properly.
The trick is asking questions that split the field roughly in half rather than questions that just check a hunch. Is it a lion? eliminates one animal. Is it a carnivore? eliminates about half of them. Good openers, roughly in order of how much they narrow things down:
- Is it a mammal?
- Does it live in water?
- Is it bigger than a dog?
- Does it eat meat?
- Would you find one in Britain?
- Could you keep one as a pet?
- Does it have more than four legs?
The endgame is the fun part. Once you know it is a nocturnal African carnivore that lives in groups, you are choosing between about four animals, and someone always confidently picks the wrong one.
Why the site exists
Because the game keeps stopping. Someone picks a pangolin, someone else asks whether it is nocturnal, and the person who chose it has no idea. Out come the phones, and five minutes later everyone is reading different Wikipedia articles and arguing about whether a pangolin counts as armoured.
This site is the fix. Type the animal, get the answers to the questions people actually ask, on one screen, in about four seconds. It is for the person who picked the animal and needs to answer honestly, and for settling arguments afterwards.
It is deliberately not a solver. Nothing here guesses the animal for you, and there is no mode that plays against you. That would ruin the only good part of the game.
Where the answers come from
Each animal's photo is the lead image from its Wikipedia article, hosted on Wikimedia Commons and credited on the page with its author and licence. The short overview under it is written for this site from published sources, listed at the bottom of each page.
Everything in Quick answers and At a glance is written by hand, because the questions people ask in this game are not the ones reference books answer. No database has a field for would people eat this or could you keep one. Those are judgement calls, which means some of them are arguable and a few are probably wrong.
Some are genuinely ambiguous rather than mistaken. A hedgehog is a common pet in some countries and illegal in others. Plenty of animals are eaten somewhere. Where an honest answer is it depends, the site says can be, sometimes or in places instead of pretending to be certain.
How we answer sets out exactly what each answer means and where the line is drawn, from what counts as “dangerous” to why a bee is domesticated and a working elephant isn't.
Who makes this
Guess My Animal is made and maintained by Nav, as an independent project. There's no company or editorial team behind it. The answers, the games and the code are one person's work, and corrections from players are what keep it honest. Get in touch about anything.
Found something wrong?
Wrong photo, wrong fact, or an animal that should be here and is not: please say. It takes ten seconds and it is the fastest way this gets better.
The small print
The site is free and has no accounts. There's one sign-in anywhere on it, and you'll only meet it if you're a streamer: Twitch stream mode lets you connect your Twitch account so your channel name fills itself in. It asks Twitch for no permissions, checks who you are once, and revokes the access key immediately — and people guessing in chat sign in to nothing at all. See the privacy page for exactly what that means and what a stream session stores.
It runs ads (Google AdSense) to help cover hosting, which set their own cookies the way ads do everywhere — see the privacy page for what that involves and what's stored. Ads are never allowed to get in the way of the answers.
It is an early, ongoing project made for fun, so expect it to keep changing.