How to play OtakuGuessr

An anime guessing game for a call with friends. Everyone sees the same cover with the title scrubbed out of the artwork, and the first person to type the show's name takes the round.

Getting a game going

Pick a name and hit Create room. You'll get a four-character room code — paste it to your friends, and they enter it under Join on the same page. There's nothing to install and no account to make; it all runs in the browser.

Whoever made the room is the host and starts the game. People can join a room that's already running — they'll drop straight into the current round rather than waiting on the lobby screen.

Settings the host picks

• Rounds — how many covers you'll play through.
• Seconds per round — the clock on each cover.
• Difficulty — which slice of the pool you're drawing from. Easy is the best-known anime, Normal casts a wider net, and Hard is anything in the pool at all.

A room never shows you the same anime twice, even across several games — so hitting "play again" keeps giving you new covers.

What counts as a correct guess

You don't have to be exact. Guesses are matched with a little slack, so spelling slips don't cost you the round:

• Capitalisation and surrounding spaces are ignored.
• Typos are forgiven in proportion to length — one for a short title, two for a longer one.
• For a title with a subtitle, the main name is enough: demon slayer is accepted for Demon Slayer: Mugen Train. The subtitle on its own isn't — mugen train won't do it, since that names the arc rather than the show.
• A distinctive single word usually works, and can be misspelled too, so frieren lands.
• Both English and Japanese titles are accepted where a show has both.

Wrong guesses cost you nothing but time — keep typing.

Scoring

Speed is the whole game. A correct guess is worth up to 1000 points, sliding down to a floor of 100 as the round clock runs out, so answering early is worth far more than answering safely. Once everybody in the room has guessed correctly the round ends immediately instead of playing out the timer.

If you get knocked offline

Refreshing the page won't remove you from your room. The game holds your seat for a few seconds and puts you back into the round in progress, with the cover and the remaining time intact. If your connection drops, the page reconnects on its own.

Where the covers come from

Artwork is drawn from MyAnimeList's popularity ranking. Nearly every cover has its title printed into the picture, which would give the answer away, so the titles are detected and blanked out ahead of time — that black band across the artwork is the part that got scrubbed.