How do I play?
Type an animal into the search input box. If you guess the hidden
species, you win! If your guess is not correct then it will be
added to the tree of life, along with the least inclusive clade
containing your guess and the answer (or a previous guess if this
one is further away).
What do the colours mean?
The game tree is coloured by how close a node is to the answer:
green is closer, red is further away.
After you have finished the daily game you can share how you did
with other people without spoiling it for them using the
automatically-generated share text. These give you coloured blocks
that correspond to your guesses throughout the game:
- Correct answer!
-
Good guess which moved you further down the tree
-
Good guess which could have been correct, you were just
unfortunate
-
Guess that confirms a clade is off-path, technically unnecessary
but often helpful
- Bad guess that didn't tell you anything
- Hint
What is a Clade?
A clade is a biological grouping that is composed of a common
ancestor and all of its descendants. For example, Dinosauria is
defined by the most recent common ancestor of
Triceratops and modern birds. This does result in a
divergence between common usage of some terms and their cladistic
meaning; by this definition, humans are all fish, since we can
trace our ancestry back to fish that emerged onto land 375 million
years ago in the Devonian.
What species are included?
I have tried to include a wide range of species to capture the
diversity of animal life. The game has three levels of difficulty
representing three differently sized lists of possible animals:
the smallest list might contain "Elephant" as an answer, and the
largest would contain the three separate species of extant
elephant.
Bugs are so hard! Can I play without them?
Yes! As well as changing the diversity of animals that are
possible answers/guesses you can change the root clade to one of
your choosing.
What on earth is a lancelet!?
As well as some more commonly known species like lions or orcas, I
have tried to include some less well-known species that showcase
the evolutionary history of animal life. The lancelet is a
chordate without a backbone - it just has a bundle of nerves and a
flexible notochord rather than a spine like us.
Why is this game so Euro-centric?
The short answer is because that's where I come from! I mainly
made this game because I wanted to play a version of it with a
wider variety of animals than the existing
Metazooa (from which this is
very obviously derived!). I essentially added animals that I'd
heard of, and so if I've not included your favourite lizard from
your home country I'm very sorry!
How are the links between clades defined?
The tree that underpins the game is derived from
Wikispecies, which defines almost a million(!) clades, from which I have
extracted a subset. This database is freely available and can be
edited by anyone. That being said, there are still many groups
where there is uncertainty in their exact evolutionary origins,
such as bats, comb jellies, and sponges. In these cases I have
manually adjusted the tree to account for recent research and to
break up polytomies to improve gameplay.
More detail on exactly how the underlying data is cleaned and
cross-linked with information from Wikipedia can be found at the
game's
GitHub repository.
I've spotted an error!
If you spot an error, whether it is a typo, incorrect clade
linkage, or bad image, feel free to raise it as an issue on the
project's
GitHub repository
so that I can fix it and improve the game for everyone.
