Cars and Games

Cars and Games is a daily card of twelve separate car puzzles built on top of real Cars & Bids auction results, and /daily is the hub where they all sit. Some ask you to name a car from a photo that has been blurred or cropped, others hand you a spec sheet and ask which of two lumps of metal sold for more. The one that gives the section its estimation flavour is Price Guess, which drops a full auction listing on you, say a 2006 BMW 530xi Sports Wagon with 128,200 miles and a clean DC title, and asks what it actually went for. The site is upfront about being a fan project with no connection to the auction house it feeds on.

1. Open /daily and pick a game from the grid, or hit Daily Mix to run all twelve in sequence with a counter that reads Game 1 of 12 at the top.
2. Answer in whatever way the game asks: a searchable model box for the photo games, a dollar field with a SUBMIT button for Price Guess, higher or lower buttons for the comparison games, drag and drop for Car Match, 4 for 4 and Cars in Order.

Most car quizzes are trivia dressed up as a game. Cars and Games is built directly on auction results, so every question has a real answer somewhere on the internet, and the See Auction link at the end means you can go and look at the car you just misjudged. The twelve-game format also solves the problem daily games usually have, which is that one puzzle is over in forty seconds: the Daily Mix gives you a proper sitting, and the individual games are short enough to dip into. If you have ever scrolled an auction site telling yourself you know what a thing is worth, this will settle the argument, usually against you.

It is game-specific rather than one uniform system, which is the point of the format. Price Guess logs each attempt in a Guess History column with a pointing-up or pointing-down emoji telling you which way to move, and a tick when you land inside the tolerance, which is ten percent of the sold price rather than the exact figure. Blurry writes wrong model names into the history in red and sharpens the photograph a notch every time you miss, so the picture you are working from improves as your position gets worse. When the round ends you get the answer, a short emoji strip for sharing, and a day-streak line with a flame on it.

Daily Mix

All twelve of the day's games in one run, headed Mix followed by Game N of 12, with a Next Game button between them. This is the closest thing to a single daily session.

Photo identification

Blurry, Snapshot and Blurshot. Same searchable answer box, three different ways of hiding the car: out of focus, cropped in tight, or both at once, which is why Blurshot carries the HARD badge.

Value estimation

Price Guess asks for a sold price within ten percent and offers a randomly generated bracket as a starting frame. Greater Than, Spec Sheet and Higher or Lower all put two real sales side by side and ask which was worth more, sometimes with the badges stripped off so you are judging pure specification.

Sorting and matching

Car Match drags titles onto vehicles, 4 for 4 rebuilds four complete listings by dropping model, year, engine, drivetrain, transmission and price into the right rows, Cars in Order sorts four cars by year, cost or engine size, and Odd One Out gives you three cars that share something and one that does not.

Endless

A separate section in the top nav carrying the same twelve titles without the daily lock, for when the day's card is used up.

• Read the listing, not the picture. Auction end date matters enormously in Price Guess, because a car sold in October 2020 was sold into a different market than one sold last month, and the site prints that date for you.
• Treat the randomly generated price bounds as a frame, not a hint. They are regenerated on every page load and are wide enough to be nearly useless on their own, but the ten percent tolerance means once you are in the right thousand you are close to safe.
• Open the gear icon before you start. Blurry lets you switch the target from Model to Manufacturer, which turns a HARD game into an easy one, and lets you tighten the wrong-guess allowance if you want the opposite.
• For the two-car comparisons, mileage beats badge. A high-mile example of an expensive model regularly loses to a low-mile example of a cheaper one, and the spec sheets are laid out so that the mileage line is the last thing you read, which is exactly the wrong order.