How it works.

Playing

Each subject has one mystery item a day: a programming language, a movie, a car. You guess an item. The game tells you how close your guess is, one tile per aspect. You have six guesses.

Read it as: the mystery language is later than 1995, also statically typed, also with automatic memory, also on a virtual machine, but with another paradigm. Its description is close to Java's. Of the 55 other languages, Java is the 7th closest.

The tiles

✓ green

The same as the mystery.

≈ amber

Close. For a number the line above the guesses says how close (within 5 years, within 15 minutes). For a description: among the closest fifth of all items.

grey

Different.

↑ ↓

The mystery is higher or later (↑), or lower or earlier (↓), than your guess.

#7 of 55

Where your guess stands when all items are ranked by how close they are to the mystery, everything taken together.

After three wrong guesses you get a clue: the description of the mystery with its name blanked.

Where Aspected comes in

Aspected is an aspect database. People ask for several things at once, and search engines answer with one blended score. Aspected keeps every aspect of the question, with its weight (a number stays a number, a category a category, text is text), and shows why each result is there.

For each mystery we asked Aspected one question: what is closest to this item? It answered with a ranking of all the others and, for each of them, a distance per aspect. The tiles are drawn from those distances. Nothing else is computed for the game.

When you have finished a mystery, tap See your guesses that way. It shows the same guesses as one number each: the same answer, without the why.

More: aspected.com and docs.aspected.com. Aspected was founded in 2025 in Hilversum; Xillio is its implementation partner.

More ways to play

Packs

Tech (languages, software failures, file formats), Pop (movies, songs, actors, cars) and Cloud (AWS services). Pick one on the first screen; its mysteries are your day.

Challenge a friend

You pick the mystery and send the link. The link does not show the answer.

Crowd round

At an event the big screen starts a round with three facts about a mystery. Everyone gets one guess on their phone. The guess Aspected ranks closest wins.

Your own data

Give it a table and every row becomes a mystery, with a tile per column. Try it where it is switched on.

Scoring: found on the first guess is 6 points, on the sixth 1, not found 0. A mystery's first result counts. The leaderboard stores a nickname and a score, nothing else.

The data, and what can be wrong

• Movies, songs, actors and cars come from Wikidata. "Famous" is measured: the number of Wikipedia languages that have a page. Wikidata can be wrong or incomplete; the game shows what it says, and a finished mystery links to its Wikidata page.
• The tech sets and AWS services were written by hand and not yet checked against sources. Categories there are a judgement call: is Python reference counted or garbage collected? Both. We picked one.
• The numbers come from Aspected 0.3.0, asked in advance and stored with the game, so it works without a connection and everyone gets the same puzzle. The arrow comes from the data: a distance has no direction.
• Not right? Every finished mystery has that link. What you send goes to the people who keep the data.

At an event

• The big screen is /booth?event=NAME&pack=tech. It shows a QR code, today's top 10 and how every mystery is going.
• Press C on the big screen, or the button in its corner, to start a crowd round. Thirty seconds, one guess each.
• The best line to say at the booth, when someone has found a mystery: "Now tap See your guesses that way. That is all your vector search would have told you."