Guess the Chain

What Guess the Chain is

Guess the Chain turns chain businesses into a map puzzle: the board plots every American location of one mystery brand as dots, anything from a fast-food name to a bank, and you have six tries to say which it is. Separate UK and Canada editions run their own daily maps, and a practice mode serves random maps with no cap.

How a round works

Type a chain's name; near spellings are matched to the closest entry. Each wrong guess comes back with three readings. A check, an approximately-equal sign or a cross tells you whether its category matches, is a related kind of business (burgers versus Mexican, both fast food) or is unrelated. An up or down arrow points toward the answer's store count. An overlap figure measures how much the two footprints coincide, and Compare drops your guess's stores onto the map as blue rings. Clues, revealed one at a time, cover store count, founding year, home state, category and first letter, and the share text records how many you took. Past maps sit in a free archive.

When Guess the Chain resets

There is no single worldwide changeover for Guess the Chain. Each player gets the new puzzle at their own local midnight, which in New York means 12:00 a.m. Eastern time.

When the other daily games reset is on one page of reset times.

Good if you like…

• Statameleon: Statameleon also asks you to identify something from the way it covers a map, here a statistic shading the world's countries, and rates every wrong answer by how much its map resembles the mystery one.
• AirportQ: AirportQ reads a map of dots in a similar way, but the dots are an airport's nonstop destinations, and misses return distance and direction rather than an overlap score.
• Globle: Globle works at country scale: each nation you name lights up on a globe in a color keyed to its distance from the answer, and guesses are unlimited.
• Redacted Maps: Redacted Maps keeps the idea of decoding a shaded map, but the mystery is what the data measures, and a miss uncovers the category, the unit or a hint.

What we checked

• Loads: yes, over HTTPS (opened Nov 5, 2026).
• On a phone: the page sets a mobile viewport and fits a phone screen without sideways scrolling.
• Embedding: the game’s site allows being shown inside other sites.
• Account: none needed for the daily puzzle.
• Past puzzles: an archive of earlier days is available.
• Extra play: an unlimited or practice mode sits beside the daily puzzle.