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How to play Rain Check

Rules, clues, hints and streaks in Rain Check, the daily guess-the-city-from-its-climate game, explained.

The goal

Name the hidden U.S. city in eight guesses or fewer, using its climate chart as your first clue. Everyone gets the same city on the same calendar day, and a new puzzle unlocks at midnight in your own time zone. Rain Check knows 263 cities, so only city names it recognizes can be guessed; a suburb that shares a weather station with a bigger city is one entry, and typing the suburb’s name — Cambridge, say — offers Boston, MA.

Playing a round

  1. Study the chart before you type anything: the solid line is each month’s average high, the dashed line the average low, the bars are precipitation, and the row of figures under the months is snow.
  2. Type a city name into the guess box and pick it from the suggestions, each shown with its state like “Austin, TX”, or press Enter once it is highlighted.
  3. Read the row of feedback that appears: distance and direction, state, winter, summer, precip and snow.
  4. Hold that row up against the chart to rule cities in or out, then submit your next guess.
  5. Keep going until you name the city or use your eighth guess, whichever comes first.

Colors and arrows

Each clue is colored blue 🔵, orange 🟠 or grey (⚪ in the share grid). Blue means a match, orange means close, and grey means a miss — the exact match and close thresholds are on the “How the clues work” card below the board. Every row shows the figures for the city you guessed, so you can compare them with the chart directly. Distance turns blue only when you have found the city; for every other guess it shows a compass arrow (↑ ↗ → ↘ ↓ ↙ ← ↖) pointing from your guess toward the hidden city, with the miles between them. Winter, summer, precip and snow use a simpler ↑ or ↓: an up arrow means the hidden city’s figure is higher than your guess, a down arrow means it is lower. A row that reads Winter 22°F with a down arrow, for example, tells you the hidden city’s average January low is colder than 22°F. State never carries an arrow, since there is no “higher” or “lower” state.

Hints

Three hints are available each round, always revealed in the same order: the city’s region, then its state, then the first letter of its name. The region is one of the Census Bureau’s nine divisions, such as West South Central or Pacific. Hints you take for free add a light bulb to your shared result. When a short optional ad is available, watching it reveals the same hint without the light bulb, so the choice between a clean solve and an assisted one is always visible to anyone you share with.

Streaks and statistics

Solving the daily puzzle on consecutive days builds your streak. Everything — streak, history and hint use — is stored in your browser rather than an account, so clearing site data resets it.

Archive and unlimited mode

The archive lets you play any past daily puzzle; archive rounds count toward your statistics but never toward your streak. Unlimited mode serves a random city whenever you finish a round, so you can practice reading climate charts for as long as you like.

Ready? Play today’s puzzle.