Guess the Chain

What Guess the Chain is

Guess the Chain is a daily geography puzzle that turns the United States into a map of dots. Each day at local midnight, a new mystery chain is chosen from restaurants, stores, gas stations, banks, or gyms, and its map shows every US location of that business. Your job is to name the chain using the distribution pattern alone: where locations cluster, which regions are empty, and whether the chain is national or regional. You have six guesses, and each wrong guess produces useful feedback. The game compares your guessed chain with the answer across business category, store count, and map coverage, so even a failed guess narrows the possibilities. You can also ask for clues that reveal the chain's category, number of locations, founding year, headquarters state, or first letter. With an archive of past maps and a practice mode, Guess the Chain works as both a quick daily challenge and a browsable road atlas of American chains.

How to play

Start by studying today's map. Look for high-density regions, empty states, and whether the pattern crosses the whole country or stays within a few corridors. Enter a chain name as your first guess; close spellings are accepted and the best match is used. You may submit up to six guesses for the daily puzzle. After each incorrect guess, review the feedback: category matches are shown with checkmarks, arrows indicate whether the real chain has more or fewer US locations than your guess, and the map shows how much coverage overlaps. Use Compare to place your guessed chain's locations in blue next to the mystery chain's dots. If you are stuck, use Get a clue to reveal one fact at a time from a pool of five clues. Past daily maps are available in the Archive, and Practice mode lets you continue after the daily puzzle.

Tips

1. Use your first guesses to lock down the category. The feedback immediately tells you whether your chain is the same kind of business as the mystery chain.
2. Read the store-count arrows as a range. If your guess has more locations and the arrow points down, the answer has fewer, so you can eliminate large nationwide chains.
3. Misspellings won't cost you a guess: close spellings are matched to the best chain name, so focus on remembering the chain rather than exact spelling.
4. When the map is inconclusive, use a clue. You have five clues available, and each reveals a different fact: category, location count, founding year, headquarters state, or first letter.