How to play Eyeball
Five things to judge by eye, with no facts to know: how many dots, what angle, what share of a shape, where a circle’s center is. One guess each — then the truth is drawn over it. One set a day, on the second shelf, outside the daily line-up.
Play today's Eyeball · Watch the gameplay demo
The rules
- A day is five rounds, dealt from twelve kinds, so one day’s five are not the next day’s. Each round is a picture and a question about it.
- Some rounds are dialed. Slide to your estimate — how many dots, what percent, how many degrees, how many times bigger or longer. The − and + buttons nudge it one step.
- Some are placed. Tap or drag on the picture — where a circle’s center is, where an arrow lands, where two lines would meet, where the average sits.
- Count shows its dots for three seconds, once. Look first, then answer. A reload does not show them again.
- Lock in commits the guess — one per round — and the truth is drawn over it: the dots striped in tens, the rest of the circle, the arrow carried on to the wall.
- A round scores 100 for a guess within a small margin of the truth — you never have to be perfect — and falls steadily to 0 for a wild one. Your score for the day is the average of the five, out of 100.
- One set a day. Your progress is saved round by round, so a refresh is not a second attempt; the archive holds every past day.
The twelve kinds of round
| Round | Answered | What it asks |
|---|---|---|
| Count | Dialed | How many dots flashed by |
| Mix | Dialed | What percent of the dots are purple |
| Share | Dialed | What percent of a shape is colored |
| Ratio | Dialed | How many of the small circle make the big one, by area |
| Path | Dialed | How many bars long a squiggle is |
| Degrees | Dialed | How many degrees an angle is |
| Angle | Placed | Make the angle named, by swinging the second ray |
| Center | Placed | Where the center of a circle is, from an arc of it |
| Meet | Placed | Where two lines would cross if they carried on |
| Mark | Placed | A fraction of the way along a line |
| Aim | Placed | Where an arrow hits a wall |
| Average | Placed | The average height of a row of bars, as a level line |
Strategy
- Count in clumps, not dots. Three seconds is not enough to count to sixty. Find a patch you can count — ten or so — and judge how many patches the cloud holds.
- Area goes as the square. A circle twice as wide holds four of the smaller one, and three times as wide holds nine. The eye reads width; Ratio asks for area.
- A squiggle is longer than it looks. The eye measures a curve by how far apart its ends are. Walk the bar along it, bend by bend.
- The average is not the middle. One tall bar among short ones pulls the average up only a little. What stands above your line should be enough to fill the gaps below it.
- Anchor on a right angle. For Angle and Degrees, picture 90° first, then half of it, and judge from the nearer one.
- For Center, finish the circle in your head. The center is farther from a shallow arc than it feels. For Meet and Aim, lay a straight edge along each line in your mind and follow it out.
- For Mark, cut the line in halves first. Three eighths is a little short of the middle; two thirds is a little past it.
Scoring
Every round has a margin inside which a guess scores the full 100, and a miss at which it scores nothing, with a straight line between the two. The day is the average of the five rounds. Eyeball sits outside the daily line-up, so its score never moves your day’s total.
| Round | 100 within | 0 at |
|---|---|---|
| Count | 8% | 60% of the count |
| Mix, Share | 3 points | 25 percentage points |
| Angle, Degrees | 3° | 30° |
| Ratio | 10% | more than double, or under half (×2.2) |
| Path | 8% | 60% of the length |
| Center | 8% | 60% of the circle’s radius |
| Meet | 8% | 40% of the longer gap to the crossing |
| Mark | 2.5% | 15% of the line |
| Aim | 2.5% | 20% of the wall |
| Average | 3% | 25% of the tallest bar |
Full details on how scoring works.