Beastle Daily Chinese mythology beast guessing game

How to play Beastle

Beastle is a daily guessing game about the beasts of Chinese mythology. Every day at midnight UTC a new mystery beast appears, and it is the same beast for every player in the world. You have six tries to name it.

You begin with the beast's silhouette: just its outline, in shadow. After a wrong guess you see a close-up of the painting itself, and each further miss zooms out and shows more, until the whole painting is in view. After three misses you also get a line from the ancient text that first described the creature, with its name blanked out. After five misses you learn its element and the part of the book it comes from.

Start typing a name and pick a beast from the list. The game accepts the English name used in Beasts of Shanhai (for example Rain Dragon), the pinyin name (Yinglong) or the Chinese name. When you finish, share your result as a grid of colored squares that gives nothing away, then come back tomorrow to keep your streak going.

Reading the clues

Every wrong guess also tells you how close you are. Each beast belongs to one of the five elements: Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water. A green square means your guess has the same element as the answer. A yellow square means the two elements are neighbors in the cycle of generation, where Wood feeds Fire, Fire makes Earth, Earth bears Metal, Metal carries Water and Water feeds Wood. A red square means they are far apart in that cycle.

The arrow compares summoning cost in the game, from 1 to 4. An up arrow means the answer costs more than the beast you guessed, a down arrow means it costs less.

Where the beasts come from

Every answer comes from the Shan Hai Jing, or Classic of Mountains and Seas, an ancient Chinese book of geography and myth more than two thousand years old. It describes hundreds of strange creatures: foxes with nine tails, birds that fill the sea with pebbles, dragons that bring rain. The paintings and the 43 beasts come from our free browser game Beasts of Shanhai.

When a round ends, you can read the full entry for that beast in our Shan Hai Jing bestiary, with the original Chinese text, our English translation and the legends that grew from it.

Want more than one beast a day? Our daily mythology trivia game asks five open questions on world myth, and every rare right answer summons one of these 43 beasts into your own collection.

Play Beasts of Shanhai free

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