How to Play Nearish: Five Questions, Five Estimates, and a 500-Point Daily Score
If you’ve ever finished a trivia quiz and thought, “I didn’t know the exact answer, but I could probably get close,” Nearish is the daily game for you. Nearish is a free daily estimation game built around five questions, five estimates, and a single 500-point score. The pitch is simple: How close can you get?
What Is Nearish?
Nearish is a daily estimation game. Every day, it presents five questions that ask for a number. Instead of picking from multiple-choice options, you submit your own estimate. Your score depends on how close your number is to the real answer. Since there are five questions and a 500-point daily maximum, the better you estimate, the stronger your overall score.
Because it’s a daily game, everyone gets the same set of questions each day. That makes Nearish easy to play on your own, and just as easy to share with friends or colleagues who want to compare scores.
How a Day of Nearish Works
The rhythm of Nearish is intentionally simple:
- Wait for the daily five questions.
- Read each question and make your best numeric estimate.
- Submit your estimate for each one.
- See your daily score when the round is over.
There’s no time pressure to overthink your answers, but there’s also no need to research anything before playing. The challenge is in using your intuition, general knowledge, and sense of scale to land as close to the correct answer as possible.
Some questions may feel familiar. Others may make you pause and reconsider your sense of everyday quantities. That’s the fun of Nearish: you don’t need to be a walking encyclopedia to do well. You just need to make a reasonable guess and get closer than other players or closer than you did yesterday.
How the 500-Point Daily Score Works
Nearish provides one daily score, and that score is measured out of 500 points.
With five questions and five estimates, the math is easy to follow at a high level: a strong day means consistently accurate estimates, not just one lucky guess. If you’re close on all five questions, the score takes care of itself.
If you’re new to the game, don’t worry too much about the exact scoring formula. Just know that the closer you are to each answer, the more points you’ll earn. A perfect 500 is the goal, but even a solid day in the 300s or 400s shows that you’ve got a good sense for numbers.
Over time, playing daily will help you calibrate your instincts. You’ll start to notice patterns in the types of quantities that appear and get a better feel for the kinds of mistakes you tend to make.
A Trivia Game for Guessers, Not Grinders
Nearish may be categorized as trivia, but it doesn’t test the kind of obscure facts you’d need to memorize. Instead, it tests your ability to estimate real-world quantities. You may not know exactly how many people fit in a basketball arena, how far away a certain landmark is, or how many times a heart beats in a day — but you likely have a rough sense of the answer.
That’s why Nearish works so well as a daily game. It’s short, focused, and doesn’t demand hours of study. Five questions is enough to feel satisfying, and one daily score makes the outcome easy to remember and compare.
Getting Started with Nearish
To play Nearish, go to nearishgame.com.
When the page loads, make sure JavaScript is enabled. The game relies on JavaScript to run, so if the page looks blank or nothing appears, checking that setting is the first step. Once the site loads, you can jump right into the day’s five questions.
No account setup is required for the basic experience, and the game is free. Just make your estimates, see your score, and return tomorrow for a new set of questions.
The Bottom Line
Nearish is the ideal daily estimation game for anyone who likes numbers, enjoys a light mental challenge, or wants a quick break from word-based puzzles. With five questions, five estimates, and a 500-point score, it fits neatly into a coffee break or a corner of a lunch hour.
Don’t overprepare. Play once, miss a few estimates, and let the score be a starting point. The real fun is seeing how much sharper your estimating skills get after a few days of Nearish.