🀄 Guess the Chinese Idiom

🕹️ How to play

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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