🀄 Guess the Chinese Idiom

One picture, one four-character idiom: pick 4 tiles from 12

👥 1 player🎭 Guess & Act⚡ No download · No sign-up

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🕹️ How to play

How to play the Chinese idiom picture quiz: The first puzzle is already on screen — nothing to configure and no account. Read the clue in the picture, then tap 4 of the 12 character tiles to fill the four slots. Tap a filled slot to send that character back, or use the clear key to empty all of them. The moment the fourth slot fills, the answer is judged; a correct guess opens the explanation card, and eight puzzles make one round.
How to read the pictures: Four devices cover almost every puzzle. Count: how many times a character repeats gives you a number word. Position: what sits above, below, inside or outside spells the direction word. Form: a character turned upside down, cut in half or faded stands for reversed, half or hidden. Arithmetic and illustration: which digit is missing from a run, or what story the drawing tells. Counting the distinct elements usually tells you how the four characters split up.
What to do when you are stuck: Three hints sit under the pool with their price printed on them: Cut the noise removes 4 distractors and caps the puzzle at two stars; Reveal first character drops the opening character into slot one and locks it, capping at one star; Show pinyin prints the full four-syllable reading and takes the stars to zero. You can also give up and read the answer after a confirmation. No hint ever asks you to watch a video or sign in.
How scoring and the end of a round work: Three stars per puzzle: solve it with no hints for three, two after Cut the noise, one after Reveal first character, zero after Show pinyin or a reveal. A wrong guess costs nothing but the taps to try again. Eight puzzles make 24 stars; the result screen shows total stars, a rating, elapsed time, the longest clean streak and how many you solved first try, plus every idiom this round unlocked.

📖 Rules & variants

Round structure: eight puzzles, drawn 3 easy / 3 medium / 2 hard on the standard tier and never repeating one of the last 48 you saw. Every puzzle gives one picture and 12 candidate characters — 4 of them spell the answer, 8 are distractors. You can only tap tiles; there is no free-text box and no timer.

Scoring: three stars is the ceiling and each hint tier lowers it by one. Hint level only ever goes up, and pressing the same hint twice costs nothing extra. Wrong guesses never cost stars — that is deliberate. Guessing is how you learn a rebus, so the stars measure how far you got unaided, not how tidy the attempt was.

Alternate readings: some pictures genuinely support a second idiom, and those are registered per puzzle. Spelling a registered alternate scores two stars and opens a double answer card showing both the intended idiom and yours; both go into your collection. A real idiom that is not registered for this puzzle is told apart from four characters that spell nothing at all, and the wording says which.

The reveal card always has four parts: the answer in large type with full pinyin; how the picture reads, mapping each element onto one character; the meaning plus a public-domain classical source (entries with no traceable earlier source are labelled folk usage rather than given an invented citation); and a modern example sentence. Giving up shows exactly the same four parts.

Tiers and variants: three difficulty tiers can be switched in the settings drawer and apply from the next round, never mid-round. A daily puzzle is seeded from the UTC date, so everyone sees the same one on the same day and the answer is revealed immediately — it is kept out of round statistics and out of the repeat window. Any unlocked idiom in your collection can be replayed for practice without affecting stars.

Playing with a group (a house rule, not a feature): put the phone in the middle of the table, first person to call out the idiom scores a point, wrong calls cost nothing, and puzzles solved with a hint score for nobody. For a harder version, a point only counts if the caller also names which element of the picture maps to which character.

Privacy: stars, the collection and the daily result live in this browser's local storage only. Nothing is uploaded and no account exists, so clearing your cache, switching devices or using private mode loses them. Private mode still plays a full round and shows the result screen; it just will not remember it. The settings drawer has a one-tap wipe of everything this site stored.

❓ FAQ

How do you play a Chinese idiom picture quiz?

Read the picture, then pick 4 of the 12 tiles to spell a four-character idiom. Tap a tile to place it, tap a filled slot to take it back, and the fourth tile triggers judging automatically. Count the distinct elements in the picture first — that usually tells you how the four characters divide up.

What is a chengyu and why are they always four characters?

A chengyu is a fixed Chinese idiom, almost always exactly four characters, that compresses a story or an image into a phrase. Because the form is fixed, a picture can encode one character per element — which is what makes the rebus genre work at all. Every reveal here gives pinyin so you learn the reading, not just the shape.

Do I need to read Chinese to play the idiom game?

You do not need to read fluently. The pictures are geometric — repetition, position, rotation, missing digits — so you can often reason your way to the answer from shapes alone, and the tiles are always visible to choose from. Each reveal then gives the literal reading of all four characters plus the real meaning.

Is there a hint if I cannot guess the idiom?

Yes, three of them, priced in stars rather than ads: cut four distractors, reveal and lock the first character, or show the full pinyin. Giving up shows the complete explanation too. Nothing is gated behind a video, a login or a daily hint allowance.

How many Chinese idiom puzzles are there and do they repeat?

96 original puzzles at launch, split 40 easy / 38 medium / 18 hard, with six extra-gentle ones reserved for a first-time player's opening puzzle. The draw skips the last 48 you saw, so puzzles inside a round are always distinct and repeats across rounds are rare; when a tier runs dry the game says so instead of quietly recycling.

Can I use this to learn Chinese idioms with pinyin and meanings?

That is the intent. Every solved or revealed idiom is stored in a collection you can browse and replay, and each card carries pinyin with tone marks, a plain-English meaning that starts from the literal reading, the classical source where one exists, and a modern example sentence.

⚠️ A casual puzzle game. Meanings and example sentences are written by us; sources cite public-domain classical works only. For entertainment and study reference.

Last updated: 2026-08-26 · Saved on this device only

🕹️ How to play

How to play the Chinese idiom picture quiz: The first puzzle is already on screen — nothing to configure and no account. Read the clue in the picture, then tap 4 of the 12 character tiles to fill the four slots. Tap a filled slot to send that character back, or use the clear key to empty all of them. The moment the fourth slot fills, the answer is judged; a correct guess opens the explanation card, and eight puzzles make one round.

How to read the pictures: Four devices cover almost every puzzle. Count: how many times a character repeats gives you a number word. Position: what sits above, below, inside or outside spells the direction word. Form: a character turned upside down, cut in half or faded stands for reversed, half or hidden. Arithmetic and illustration: which digit is missing from a run, or what story the drawing tells. Counting the distinct elements usually tells you how the four characters split up.

What to do when you are stuck: Three hints sit under the pool with their price printed on them: Cut the noise removes 4 distractors and caps the puzzle at two stars; Reveal first character drops the opening character into slot one and locks it, capping at one star; Show pinyin prints the full four-syllable reading and takes the stars to zero. You can also give up and read the answer after a confirmation. No hint ever asks you to watch a video or sign in.

How scoring and the end of a round work: Three stars per puzzle: solve it with no hints for three, two after Cut the noise, one after Reveal first character, zero after Show pinyin or a reveal. A wrong guess costs nothing but the taps to try again. Eight puzzles make 24 stars; the result screen shows total stars, a rating, elapsed time, the longest clean streak and how many you solved first try, plus every idiom this round unlocked.