CocktailGuessr

One photograph of a finished drink, and you name it. CocktailGuessr puts the picture on the left, a search box with autocomplete on the right, and nothing else in between: no ingredient list, no glass diagram, just what the bartender put on the counter. Five guesses, and every wrong one buys you a fact about the drink instead of a hint about your answer. It runs on Stoop, the same shelf as DailyGuessr and FlagGuessr, and the puzzle rolls over at midnight UTC so the whole world is looking at the same glass.

1. Study the photo. Glass shape, colour, ice, garnish, rim treatment: that is the entire brief for guess one.
2. Type a name into the search box and pick from the autocomplete list, then press Guess.
3. Read the hint that unlocks after a wrong guess and go again.
4. Land it inside five guesses. The earlier you land it, the higher your score and the better your title.

Most daily guessing games hand you a fragment and ask you to rebuild the whole. CocktailGuessr hands you the finished object and asks what it is called, which is exactly the problem you face standing at a bar looking at somebody else's drink. The hint ladder is the clever part: it does not tell you whether you are close, it tells you something true about the cocktail, so a losing round still ends with you knowing a recipe you did not know before. Add a flat scoring ladder that punishes fishing and a nightly reset shared by everyone, and you have a game that teaches while it scores.

There is no per-letter colouring here, the reply to a wrong guess is a new hint. The ladder printed beside the board runs main spirit, then origin, then flavour profile, then first letter, which is a deliberate progression from category to alphabet: the first three narrow the family, the last one is the mercy rule. Worth knowing that a longer article further down the same page lists a different set of hints, glass type and ingredient count and IBA category. The panel next to the board is the one the game actually follows. Scoring is a flat ladder rather than a curve, 10,000 for a first-guess win down to 2,000 on the fifth, each rung carrying a title from MASTER MIXOLOGIST to FIRST TIMER.

Core play

Single daily puzzle: one photograph of a finished drink (left) and a search box with autocomplete (right). You have five guesses; each wrong guess unlocks the next hint in a fixed ladder (main spirit, then origin, then flavour profile, then first letter). The puzzle rolls over at midnight UTC and is the same puzzle for every player worldwide.

• Name the glass before you name the drink. A coupe, a highball and a rocks glass each rule out most of the library, and the photo is the only evidence you get before you have spent a guess.
• Every extra guess costs a flat 2,000 points, so a speculative answer is never free even when it feels like it unlocks a useful hint.
• Hint two is origin, not era. If it hands you a country, think about what that country's bars were pouring rather than about who wrote the recipe down first.