Metazooa is a daily game where you identify the daily animal, giving you taxonomic hints. Bear with me; I promise this game is more fun than it sounds 🙇🤓.

Metazooa is to zoology what Wordle is vocabulary – a clever way to learn while having fun. This puzzle draws you into the fascinating world of animal taxonomy, exploring the relationships between species, families, genera, classes, etc. While a basic understanding of the tree of life can give you a head start, the more you play, the more you’ll grasp how the different taxa relate to each other.

Like many other daily games, the way this game starts is by initially making a random guess. The game then informs you about the closest common group between your guess and the secret animal. You will have 20 chances to guess the correct animal.

For example, if the secret animal is human and you guess chimpazee, the closest common group is Homininae, the subfamily commonly known as “African apes” that also includes gorillas and bonobos. If instead you guessed clownfish, the closest common group would be Euteleostomi, which contains almost all vertebrate animals. The game will also give you an excerpt from wikipedia about that group, which can give you important hints about what other animals belong to this group. If you’re still stuck, you can dive deeper in wikipedia to find more about that group.

Now, there are over 1.5 million known animal species, 400.000 of which are beetles alone 🪲🐞. Thankfully, Metazooa keeps things simple by focusing on animals that most people would recognize. The game narrows it down to just a few hundred possible species, and uses a simplified taxonomy – for instance all snails are grouped into a single “snail” species. While sure to enrage every single biologist alive, this simplicity allows the game to remain fun and accessible to everyone.

If animals aren’t your cup of tea – or you’ve already guessed all animals twice over – you can switch it up a little with Metaflora. The concept is the same, but this time with plant species (which this author personally finds orders of magnitude more confusing). For even more variety, dive into other creative web games by Trainwreck Labs. Whether it’s fauna, flora, geography or history, there’s plenty to play and discover!