MealMap

MealMap is a daily food-geography puzzle. You are shown a dish — what is in it, how it is made, what it looks like — and asked where it comes from. You have five guesses.

Every wrong guess is useful. The game answers with a compass bearing pointing from your guess toward the real country, and a warm-to-cold reading of how far off you are. Guessing Brazil and being told "cold, north-east" is a much better position than it sounds: you have converted the whole world into a wedge. Good players spend their first guess buying information rather than trying to be right.

The dish's name is withheld until you earn it — each wrong guess reveals a little more of it — because the name usually gives the country away. What you get instead are ingredients and technique, which travel: a fermented staple, a particular chilli, a way of wrapping dough. Those are the real evidence.

Scoring rewards precision. Getting the country on the first guess is worth the maximum, and each further guess is worth less; a fifth-guess win still beats not finishing, and an unsolved round earns a participation floor.

Because the feedback is geographic rather than categorical, MealMap ends up teaching geography as much as food. Five guesses is enough to triangulate almost anywhere on earth if you use the compass properly, and players who lose usually lose by guessing neighbours of their first answer instead of following the bearing across the map.

Many dishes are claimed by more than one country, so the answer accepts every country with a genuine claim, and the reveal shows them all with sources. Everybody is served the same dish each day.

How to play

1. Read the dish — its description, its ingredients, and its photographs.
2. Guess the country you think it comes from.
3. A wrong guess tells you which direction the answer lies and how far away it is.
4. Find the country in as few guesses as you can. You have six.

Strategy

Read the ingredients before the photograph. A dish's staple starch, fat and spice base narrow the world far faster than the way it is plated: the grain it is built on, whether it is cooked in butter, olive oil or a fermented paste, and which chilli or spice blend it leans on are all strong regional signals. The description is written to avoid naming the country, but it cannot avoid describing the cooking.

Then open with a guess that is informative rather than likely. Every wrong guess returns a compass direction and a warmth band, so a first guess in the middle of a plausible region tells you more than a shot at a country you are only half backing. Two guesses that bracket the answer from different directions will usually pin the region on the third.

Treat the feedback as geometry, not as a hint. Each new guess constrains the answer against every previous one, so the intersection of your compass readings matters more than the warmest single guess. Red Hot means a shared land border rather than merely close, which is often the most useful reading of all — and remember more than one country can be accepted for a dish that genuinely belongs to a region rather than a border.

Bear in mind that the answer is a country of origin, not the country where the dish is most popular today. Migration, colonial history and trade have moved a great many dishes a long way from where they were first cooked, and the version you know may be a descendant rather than the original. When a dish feels like it belongs to two places at once, favour the older claim — and note that the round may accept both.

Where the data comes from

Every MealMap puzzle is built from published, dated data, and each challenge links the source it drew its numbers from. These are the references we draw on:

• Wikipedia