Making things

Gamecove

Fourteen daily guessing games that share one engine and one set of rules, each dressed in the material of its own subject: a nautical chart for the ships, a cockpit panel for the aviation weather, seismograph drum paper for the earthquakes, a specimen card for the minerals. One puzzle a day in each, two minutes each, the same puzzle for everybody.

What it is

Eleven of them are guessing games. You name a ship, a tower, a volcano, a mineral, an airport, an airline, a lighthouse, a national park, a cathedral, a nuclear plant or an aircraft type, and every guess is scored attribute by attribute - exact match, partial match, an arrow when a number is higher or lower - until you close in. Six guesses. The other three hand you a real report filed by a real weather service or seismic network and ask five questions about how to read it.

The day is not a random draw. Each game carries a calendar built before release, with no repeats, ordered so the answers most of the world writes about come first. Because the calendar ships frozen inside the game, tomorrow's answer is not sitting in today's page. The two aviation games are the exception: their puzzles are topped up from the live weather feed, so the report you decode was filed in the last day or so. Missed days stay playable in each game's archive.

The point is the moment after the puzzle ends. The game shows you the answer with a short piece of writing about it, quoted from the same public sources the puzzle was built from.

Where the questions come from

A game only gets built if its subject has a public, openly licensed dataset behind it. That rule is why there is a volcano game and no film game.

The datasets: Wikidata (CC0) carries most of the guessing games. The Smithsonian Institution's Global Volcanism Program stands behind Volcanodle, the United States Geological Survey behind Quakedle, OurAirports behind Airport-dle, OpenFlights behind Airline-dle, and the NOAA aviation weather service behind METAR Daily and TAF Daily.
The writing on the reveal: Quoted, not generated: English Wikipedia extracts under CC BY-SA 4.0 in most games, the volcano's own geological summary in Volcanodle, and in the two aviation games a decode written by the site's own parser. No part of a puzzle is written by a language model at play time. Each game lists its own sources and licences on its own attribution page, including the licence of every photograph in the one game that uses them.

What it does not do

There is no sign-up, no login and nothing to fill in. Your streak, your statistics and the puzzles you have finished live in your own browser's local storage and are never sent anywhere; each game has a control that exports that record to a file, which is the only way it moves between devices. The site runs no analytics and no tracking scripts, and serves no advertising today and sets no advertising cookies. If that ever changes, the games will ask first where consent is required, and the cookies page will say plainly what is set.

Where it stands

Live and free. Fourteen games, one new puzzle in each every day at midnight UTC, in the browser, nothing to install. A correction to a fact is the most useful message the site can get: the datasets are public, so an error can usually be traced and fixed at the source as well.

gamecove.gamesHow the games are built, in the site's own words, is at gamecove.games/about.

Elsewhere: vahti·Vigla·Asuntodata·Gamecove·Facet·Forge·keeplocal