One artist is picked for the whole world each UTC day and you get ten guesses. Every guess has to be a real act from the game's list of 432, and every one you spend tells you five things about the answer.

What the five columns mean

Formed and Members also carry an arrow, and the arrow points at the answer rather than at your guess. Guess Queen, see a down arrow on Formed, and the answer is older than 1970. The arrow shows even when the square is red, so a red down arrow still tells you the answer is more than five years earlier.

A worked opening

Open with Queen and you have played rock, 1970, four members, UK, band. Suppose it comes back yellow on genre, red with a down arrow on formed, green on members, yellow on country, green on solo-or-band.

Read it properly and that is most of the list gone. Not a rock act, but one carrying rock or pop as a secondary tag. Formed before 1965. A four-piece. European but not British. A band. You are now choosing between a few candidates rather than 432, on one guess.

Tactics that actually help

• Open wide, not close. A guess you half-believe is worth less than one that splits the field. The list runs 1949 to 2022 across 29 countries, so an opener from the middle of that range with an unusual line-up size rules out more than a safe pick does.
• Solo or band is the cheapest halving on the board. It is binary and it is never yellow, so it always lands one way or the other.
• Yellow on genre is a strong steer. It means you brushed one of the answer's secondary tags, which usually puts you one step away rather than lost. Red on genre is the more useful signal early, because 30 genres are in play and a red kills a whole cluster.
• Do not chase the year first. Five years is a narrow window and most guesses come back red on it. Pin country and members down, then date what is left.

Where the facts come from

The list is built by hand rather than scraped, which is why it is 432 acts and not fifty thousand. Formed is the year a band came together or a solo artist first released. Members is the best-known line-up, so The Beatles are four. Solo artists are one.

These are the widely agreed facts rather than the arguable ones, deliberately. A puzzle that turns on whether a touring keyboardist counts is a bad puzzle, and the dataset is chosen to avoid that argument rather than to win it.

Guesses are scored on the server. The answer is not in the page you are served, so there is nothing to read out of the developer console, and everybody gets the same artist on the same day.

You are shown a music video and its view count. A second video arrives without one, and you say whether it has more views or fewer. Get it right and that video becomes the known one. Get it wrong and the run ends.

Eleven videos make ten calls, and ten out of ten is a perfect day. Everybody gets the same eleven in the same order, worked out from the date.

The numbers are live

View counts are read from the YouTube Data API when the puzzle loads, not stored in the game. So they are the real current figures, and they move. A video you narrowly called yesterday may have passed the one you compared it against.

The pool is 157 hand-picked music videos, deliberately mixing all-time monsters with merely enormous ones. If every pair were Despacito against an album track the game would be trivial, so the list is built to keep comparisons close.

What people get wrong

• Chart success is not view count. A song can be everywhere on radio and stream well while its video does modest numbers. What you are ranking is the video, and the video is a different product.
• Age beats popularity more often than you expect. A 2012 video has had over a decade to accumulate. A huge 2023 release is often still behind something you had half-forgotten.
• Watch for kids and karaoke. Nursery-rhyme-adjacent and endlessly-replayed videos accumulate views in a way that has nothing to do with whether anybody rates the song.
• The gap between one and two billion is enormous. Once you are in that range, small differences in your intuition are worth hundreds of millions of views. Anchor on the number you can see rather than on your sense of scale.

Streaks

Your streak counts consecutive days played and lives in your own browser rather than on an account. Miss a day and it resets. Clear your site data and it goes too, which is the trade for not making you sign up for anything.

The other four dailies

This is one of five. Artistle is the guess-the-artist game, Medley is Connections for songs, Before or After asks which of two songs came out first, and Daily Blind Ranking makes you rank ten artists without knowing who is coming. Missed one? The archive goes back to each game's launch.