Rain Check

What is Rain Check?

Rain Check is a free daily geography game built around a climate chart. Every day the site hides one U.S. city behind the chart of its weather — its average highs and lows, its precipitation and its snowfall, month by month — and you have eight guesses to name it. The chart is on the board before you make a single guess, so you can start reasoning straight away. Type any of the 263 cities in the game into the guess box, from Abilene to Yuma, and submit it. Right or wrong, every guess adds a row of feedback that narrows down where the hidden city is and how its weather compares with the one you tried. All 263 cities can be guessed, and 172 of them can come up as the answer of the day.

How the clues work

Each guess is compared with the hidden city across six clues. Distance and direction measure the great-circle miles between the two cities and read close within 250 miles; an arrow points from your guess toward the hidden city, and the clue turns blue only when you have named the city itself. State matches if both cities are in the same state, and reads close if they are in different states of the same one of the Census Bureau’s nine divisions. Winter is the average low temperature in January and Summer the average high in July: each matches within 2°F and reads close within 8°F. Precip is the year’s precipitation, which means rain plus melted snow, and it matches within 5 percent of the true figure and reads close within 25 percent. Snow is the year’s snowfall and matches within 2 inches and reads close within 10 inches. Every numeric clue that does not match still carries an arrow showing whether the true value is higher or lower than your guess.

Reading the chart

The chart is the puzzle’s main clue. The solid line traces each month’s average high and the dashed line each month’s average low, both against the temperature scale on the left, which runs from −20°F to 110°F for every city. The bars show each month’s precipitation against the scale on the right, which tops out at 15 inches. The row of figures under the month letters is each month’s snowfall in inches, with a dash for a month that averages under a tenth of an inch, and two lines beneath give the year’s total precipitation and total snow. Because every city is drawn on the same scales, the same height always means the same value: a line that sits high on today’s chart is as hot as a line that sits equally high on any other. The figures are monthly averages for 1991–2020 from NOAA, explained on the data and method page, and a table with the same numbers sits behind the chart for screen readers.

Fair play and streaks

Three hints are available each round, always in the same order: the city’s region, which is one of the nine Census divisions, then its state, then the first letter of its name. A hint you reveal for free adds a small light bulb (💡) to the result you share, so friends can tell a clean solve from an assisted one. When a short optional ad is available, you can watch it instead to reveal the same hint without the light bulb. A new city unlocks every day at midnight in your own time zone, everyone gets the same one on the same calendar day, and there is no account to create — your streak and history live in your browser alone.