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Rain Check strategy guide

How to read a climate chart and use distance, direction, winter lows, summer highs and snowfall to find the U.S. city in fewer guesses.

Rain Check rewards the same habits a meteorologist or a geography teacher would use to place an unfamiliar city on a map: how sharp are the seasons, how wet is it, and does it snow? You don’t need to memorize the climates of 263 cities. You need to read the chart the game hands you before you guess, open with a city that splits the map, and read each row of clues in the order that narrows things fastest. This guide walks through that plan, and the figures in it are computed from the same data the game uses.

1. Read the chart before you guess

Start with how far apart the seasons sit on the chart, which is really the gap between July’s highs and January’s lows. Small gaps are rare and revealing: of Rain Check’s 263 cities, San Juan has the smallest gap between its July high and its January low, at 17°F, followed by Hilo at 19°F, San Francisco at 20°F and Honolulu at 21°F. All 28 cities with a gap of 35°F or less are in Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Florida or California. At the other extreme, Fairbanks has a gap of 90°F, and the 26 cities with a gap of 70°F or more are all in Alaska, Colorado, Iowa, Illinois, Kansas, Maine, Minnesota, the Dakotas, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Utah, Wisconsin or Wyoming. A wide gap says interior and north; a narrow one says an island or a warm coast.

Next, read the snow row, because it sorts the list faster than anything else on the chart. A dash under every month means the city’s snow normals are zero all year, and 105 of the 263 cities are like that. They are all in Alabama, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oregon, Puerto Rico, South Carolina, Texas or Washington. The reverse is just as useful: none of the 48 cities in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Florida averages more than 2.4 inches of snow a year, so a chart with more snow than that rules all six states out. Meanwhile 84 cities average 20 inches or more and 20 average 60 or more; the four snowiest, Syracuse, Erie, Rochester and Buffalo, all sit on or near the eastern Great Lakes.

Then read the shape of the precipitation bars, not just their height. Bars that swell in summer and shrink in winter point to the desert Southwest or to Florida: El Paso, Las Cruces, Tucson and Albuquerque each get more than half of their yearly precipitation between June and September, and Tampa gets 30.2 of its 49.5 inches in those four months. With a bitterly cold winter to match, the same shape points to the northern Plains, where Bismarck and Fargo also get more than half of their precipitation in those months. The Pacific coast is the mirror image. Los Angeles gets 0.24 inch of its 14.3 inches from June through September, and every one of the 34 cities that get 8 percent or less of their year’s precipitation in those months is in California. Remember that precip counts rain plus melted snow, so a snowy city can look wetter on the chart than its rainfall alone would suggest.

2. Open from the middle of the map

Your first guess should split the possibilities rather than aim for the answer. A strong opener sits near the middle of the map, because a central city gives a useful arrow whichever way the true answer lies. Missouri is the middle: of Rain Check’s 263 cities, Springfield, Columbia and St. Louis are the three with the shortest average distance to the other 262, at 903, 907 and 908 miles, and Kansas City ranks sixth at 914. Kansas City is also a middling city on the numbers. Its July high of 90°F and yearly precipitation of 38.1 inches are within about a degree and an inch and a half of the list’s medians, 89°F and 39.5 inches, so its Summer and Precip clues can point either way.

Avoid opening from the edge of the map. Honolulu is 2,393 miles from San Francisco, the nearest city in the game outside Hawaii, and Hilo is the only other city within 1,000 miles of it. An opener there returns an enormous distance and an arrow that points the same way for almost every other city, so you learn little. If the chart itself is unmistakable, skip the standard opener and guess inside the group it points to: a flat line with no snow at all belongs to Florida, Hawaii, Puerto Rico or coastal California.

3. Read the arrow before the miles

Distance reads close within 250 miles or a miss beyond it, and it turns blue only when you have found the city. The arrow is the more useful half of that clue. It always points from the city you guessed toward the hidden one, in one of eight compass directions, whichever way that happens to be. A guess that misses distance but points firmly northwest tells you more about where to look next than a raw number of miles does, especially once you have two or three guesses to triangulate from. A close reading, on the other hand, is a strong clue in its own right: only 12 other cities in the game sit within 250 miles of Kansas City, and only 24 within 250 miles of Chicago, so a close distance leaves a short list.

Read the chart first, open from the middle, and let the arrows do the triangulating.

4. Know the nine divisions

The State clue reads close whenever your guess and the answer are in different states of the same Census Bureau division. Rain Check uses all nine, and the hint that gives the city’s region names one of them:

  • New England — CT, ME, MA, NH, RI and VT, with 12 cities.
  • Middle Atlantic — NJ, NY and PA, with 14 cities.
  • East North Central — IL, IN, MI, OH and WI, with 28 cities.
  • West North Central — IA, KS, MN, MO, NE, ND and SD, with 20 cities.
  • South Atlantic — DE, DC, FL, GA, MD, NC, SC, VA and WV, plus Puerto Rico, with 55 cities.
  • East South Central — AL, KY, MS and TN, with 16 cities.
  • West South Central — AR, LA, OK and TX, with 39 cities.
  • Mountain — AZ, CO, ID, MT, NV, NM, UT and WY, with 24 cities.
  • Pacific — AK, CA, HI, OR and WA, with 55 cities.

A few of these are not what most people would draw. Alaska and Hawaii belong to the Pacific division with California, Oregon and Washington, so a close State clue after a California guess could just as well be Honolulu. The South Atlantic runs from Delaware down to Florida and takes in Washington, D.C., along with Puerto Rico, which the Census leaves out of every division and Rain Check groups with its nearest mainland neighbors. Texas and Oklahoma sit with Arkansas and Louisiana rather than with Arizona and New Mexico, and Missouri sits with Kansas, Nebraska and the Dakotas, which is why Kansas City guessed against a Wichita answer reads close on State. California is the biggest state in the game with 36 cities, followed by Texas with 30 and Florida with 24, so a blue State clue there leaves the most work.

5. Treat the four numbers as filters

Winter and Summer both match within 2°F and read close within 8°F, but they are not equally sharp. January lows run from −17°F in Fairbanks to 72°F in San Juan, a spread of 89 degrees, so a close reading covers a 16-degree window of it. July highs run only from 64°F in Juneau to 108°F in Palm Springs, so the same window covers more than a third of the range. Lean on Winter to narrow the list and treat a close Summer as weak evidence. Only eight cities average a January low below 10°F, and seven average 60°F or warmer, all in Puerto Rico, Hawaii or South Florida; nine show a July high of 100°F or more, five of them in Arizona.

Precip is proportional: it matches within 5 percent and reads close within 25 percent of the hidden city’s figure, so it is sharp in dry cities and loose in wet ones. For an answer like Yuma, at 3.3 inches a year the driest city in the game, close means within about 0.8 inch. For Miami, at 67.4 inches, it means within about 17. Hilo, at 120.4 inches, is the wettest city by a wide margin; the next wettest is Pensacola at 68.3. Snow is measured in absolute inches, within 2 for a match and 10 for close. That makes it blunt among snowless cities, since 126 of the 263 average 2 inches or less, and sharp among the snowiest, where a blue Snow clue means the answer’s total is within 2 inches of your guess’s.

6. Let distance split near-twin cities

Some cities sit so close together that their charts are almost identical, and then the chart cannot separate them; the distance clue can. Boston and Providence are 41 miles apart. Their winter lows (23°F and 22°F) and summer highs (82°F and 84°F) both match and their precipitation reads close, and the clue that pulls them apart is snow, with 49 inches a year in Boston and 37 in Providence. Dallas and Fort Worth are 34 miles apart and share a state. Guess one when the answer is the other and State, Summer and Snow come back blue while Distance, Winter and Precip read close, which is about as good as a wrong guess gets. The arrow and the short distance tell you what happened: you are in the right metro area and one entry away. Dallas and Fort Worth are separate entries, while cities that share a weather station, such as Cambridge, are folded into the bigger city’s entry as an alternate name.

7. When to take a hint

The region hint is most valuable early, when you have not yet placed the city on the map at all. It names one of the nine divisions. The state hint pays off once you have narrowed things to a division but keep guessing the wrong state within it. The first-letter hint is strongest late in a round, when you have two or three candidates left and can simply check which name fits.

8. Two worked rounds

Suppose the answer is Denver and you open with Kansas City. The row reads: distance ← 553 mi, a miss; State MO, a miss, because Missouri and Colorado sit in different divisions; Winter 22°F, close with a down arrow; Summer 90°F, a match; Precip 38.1 in, a miss with a down arrow; Snow 11 in, a miss with an up arrow. Together that reads as a city well to the west, with a colder January, the same July heat, far less precipitation and far more snow: the high plains at the foot of the Rockies. Only two cities in the game would produce that exact row against Kansas City, Denver and Greeley. Guess Colorado Springs next and the row turns mostly blue and orange: distance ↑ 62 mi, close; State CO, a match; Winter 19°F, a match; Summer 87°F, close with an up arrow; Precip 15.9 in, a match; Snow 33 in, a miss with an up arrow. Same state, 62 miles north, and snowier. That is Denver.

Now suppose the answer is Seattle and you open with St. Louis. The row reads: distance ↖ 1,719 mi, a miss; State MO, a miss; Winter 24°F, a miss with an up arrow; Summer 90°F, a miss with a down arrow; Precip 41.7 in, close with a down arrow; Snow 17 in, a miss with a down arrow. A city far to the northwest with a milder winter, a cooler summer, less snow and about the same precipitation is on the Pacific coast, so you try Portland. The row lights up: distance ↑ 145 mi, close; State OR, close; Winter 36°F, a match; Summer 82°F, close with a down arrow; Precip 36.9 in, a match; Snow 4.2 in, a match. Portland’s climate is nearly Seattle’s, and the only thing that says it isn’t Portland is the arrow, pointing north for 145 miles. Follow it.

9. Common mistakes

  • Opening from Honolulu, Anchorage or San Juan and learning little from the extreme distance.
  • Skipping the snow row, which splits the list faster than any other part of the chart.
  • Treating a close Summer as a match, when 8°F is a wide band on a scale where July highs run from 64°F to 108°F.
  • Forgetting that Alaska and Hawaii share a division with California, Oregon and Washington.
  • Reading precip as rainfall alone, when it includes melted snow.
  • Stopping at a wall of blue and orange, when the distance arrow is still telling you the answer is elsewhere.

Practice these reads in unlimited mode until they feel automatic, then bring them back to the daily puzzle. The how to play page has the rules, and the data and method page explains where the numbers come from.