ABOUT THE GAME
About Size It Up
Size It Up is an independent daily puzzle about the one thing photographs never tell you: how big something really is. It started as a weekend experiment in drawing two silhouettes on one ruler and grew into a library of 156 calibrated objects, from a ladybird beetle to the Sun.
Five rounds, once a day
Every day at midnight Eastern Time a new puzzle opens with five comparisons. Each round shows a familiar reference object drawn at its true size and a mystery object beside it. You resize the mystery object until the proportion looks right, lock in, and the reveal overlays the true outline with the real measurement. A round is worth up to 100 points, so a perfect day scores 500. Everyone gets the same five rounds, which is what makes the answers pages and the leaderboard comparable.
Between daily puzzles, Unlimited draws fresh practice sets from the whole library, and each of the categories has its own set — animals, vehicles, landmarks, space, geography, dinosaurs and more. Practice never touches your streak.
How scoring works
Only proportion counts. The game compares the ratio you chose with the true ratio between the two objects and scores the error on a logarithmic curve, so being twice too big is judged exactly as harshly as being half the size. An exact match scores 100, ten percent off scores about 85, and a factor of two scores about 32. Because the score depends on the ratio rather than on raw centimetres, a mouse beside a cat is as fair a test as the Sun beside Jupiter. The how-to-play guide has the full rules.
Where the measurements come from
Each object has one canonical measurement along a named axis — height, length or span — and every number links to its published source on the reveal, on the answers pages and on the sources page. Today all 156 built-in sizes are referenced to Wikipedia articles, which in turn cite the manufacturer, museum or survey behind the figure. Where a size genuinely varies — an animal, a ship class, a country's span — the game uses a typical or official figure and says which dimension it is measuring, so the comparison stays honest.
How the silhouettes are drawn
Silhouettes are cropped to their real outline, so the drawing box equals the measured size and nothing is padded. Animals and dinosaurs are traced from PhyloPic, country outlines come from Natural Earth, and landmarks, vehicles, instruments and everyday objects are original project vectors with a few Font Awesome Free icons. Photo objects from anime, games and film use the official canon figure and note when a size is approximate. Credits and licences for every drawing are on the sources page.
Fair play
The daily puzzle is generated from the calendar date, so every player gets the same five rounds. Scores are recomputed on the server from the guesses you submit, which keeps the leaderboard honest, and new objects only enter dated puzzles two days after they are published so a board never changes while people are playing it.
Contact
Spotted a wrong measurement or want to suggest an object? Open the source link on the reveal to check the figure first — corrections with a citation are always welcome at contact@sizeitupgames.com. The contact page lists what to include so we can act on it quickly.