Every round starts with a photo buried under a layer of foil. Drag across the card to scratch the foil off. The four possible names sit under the picture from the first second, so you can lock one in whenever you like, including before you have scratched anything at all.
Your score is 100 minus the percentage you scratched. Guess at 8% and you take 92 points. Guess at 70% and you take 30. A wrong name scores nothing, however little of the photo you used. The game rewards committing early, not scraping the card clean and then answering.
Scratching one small hole over an eye would be an easy way to win, so the picture does not simply appear wherever you scrape. How sharp any part of it looks depends on how much of the whole card you have cleared, not on which part you cleared. At 10% even a well aimed scratch is a soft smudge. Detail arrives slowly, and it costs you points to get it.
The crop moves as well. Each photo loads slightly rotated, slightly zoomed and slightly off centre, so there is no reliable spot to aim at and no way to learn one.
One photo is picked for each calendar day, and it is the same photo for everyone that day. You get one attempt at it. Play on consecutive days and a streak builds up next to the category buttons.
Streaks and best scores are kept in your own browser and nowhere else. Nothing is sent to a server, so they do not follow you to another phone or laptop, and clearing your browsing data clears them.
After any round you can copy a link that carries your result. Whoever opens it gets the same photo and a line telling them the number to beat. The link leaves the name out on purpose, because handing over the answer would make the challenge pointless.
For something longer there is a run of five or ten pictures. You play the whole set, copy one link, and whoever opens it gets the same pictures in the same order. Their result screen puts the two runs side by side, round by round, so you can see which ones you won rather than only who finished ahead. Nothing is stored anywhere: the picture list and the scores travel inside the link itself.
Pictures are grouped by the kind of thing you are naming. The three wrong answers in every round are chosen to sit as close to the right one as possible, which is what stops it being obvious. Each category has a page of its own:
Not every category is a face. World Flags and Country Shapes work the same way but ask you to name a country instead. The three wrong answers there are always close enough to make you look twice, which is the whole trick: a thin strip of blue could be half of Europe until you have scratched enough to be sure.
More categories are on the way, covering film, current sport and people known from the internet. They appear here as soon as they hold real photographs.
There is a party mode for when several people are in the same room. Everyone plays on one device, taking turns, with a hand off screen in between so nobody sees the next picture early. Scores add up across the round and the game ends on a leaderboard.
You can also build your own pack from photos on your phone or laptop, which is the version people use for office parties and birthdays. Those photos never leave your device. They are not uploaded here or anywhere else, and they are stored by your own browser until you delete the pack.