Questions about Size It Up

Size It Up is a daily game about physical size. Each round puts two silhouettes on the same ground line: a blue one held at true scale, and a red one that starts at an arbitrary size. You stretch the red shape until the pair would look right standing side by side in the real world, then lock it in. Five rounds make a set, and a set takes about three minutes.

Scoring compares the size you committed to against the true size, and reads the difference as a percentage of the true one. Land within 6 percent and the round pays the full 100 points. Around 12 percent off pays about 90, 20 percent pays about 78, and half the true size pays about 45. Once you are more than 1.6 times off, the round pays nothing. Five rounds add up to 500.

It marks the one dimension the round is judged on. For an upright object such as the Eiffel Tower or a giraffe, the guide runs vertically and only height counts. For a long object such as a blue whale, a shipping container or the width of Russia, it runs horizontally and only length counts. Of the 196 objects in the daily pool, 105 are measured along their length, so checking the guide before you drag anything is worth the second it takes.

Because a number would replace the exercise with arithmetic. The point is to reason from one shape you can see to another, the way you do when you say something is about the height of a door. The real measurement of both objects appears the moment you lock in, in metres, centimetres or kilometres depending on the size, and the true outline is drawn over your answer so you can see the gap rather than just read it.

Yes. A set belongs to its date, not to the person playing it. Everyone who opens the daily game on a given day gets the same five pairings, in the same order, with the same reference on the blue side. That is what makes a shared score comparable, and it is also why an old date replayed from the archive is identical to the day it went out.

Every set published so far stays playable. There are 171 of them: 120 for the daily game going back to 22 May 2026, 33 for Pop Culture and 18 for Geography. The archive lists them by date, shows the score this browser has recorded for each one, and lets you replay any of them.

There is no account and no server holding results. Progress, statistics and the small preview images on the end screen are written to this browser's local storage and stay on this device. Clearing your site data erases them with no way back, and opening the game in another browser or on another phone starts a fresh record.

Each object carries three things: a traced outline, one real-world measurement in metres, and the axis that measurement belongs to. Geographic outlines come from open mapping data; the rest are drawn shapes. The sources page lists all 585 of them with the provenance and the rights basis recorded for each, and it can be searched by name.

Because the pool deliberately spans a huge range: the daily objects run from a 5.8 mm garden ant to Saturn, measured at 273,550 km across its main rings rather than across the planet, which is 120,536 km wide, a ratio of roughly forty-seven billion to one. Pairings are drawn from combinations that have actually been used together, so the two shapes stay within a sane ratio, but a round can still ask you to judge something you have no reference point for. When the red shape will not fit, zoom the board out rather than guessing small.

Practice. It assembles a fresh set of five on demand instead of once a day, using the same pool and the same scoring. Those results are kept out of your statistics on purpose, so your streak, average and score spread only ever reflect dated sets.