Honestly, you don't have to be a taxonomy geek to enjoy playing this game, but it helps if you understand a bit about animal classification. In Metazooa, you have 20 guesses to find the mystery animal of the day. Each wrong guess will give you another branch on a taxonomy tree. You will find out if your guess fell into the same phylum, clade, suborder, etc. as the real answer, or if not, you can look in another direction. The taxonomic tree pictured here is what they presented as an example, and has nothing to do with today's animal. Be warned that there are a lot of common animals that aren't in their database, but guessing one will not use up a turn. Oh yeah, they keep track of your wins, too.
I got today's answer in ten guesses, but it wasn't easy. In every taxonomic rank, I confronted words I had never seen before, and had to look them up. It's a good thing the game doesn't have a time limit. They have an option for a practice round that I didn't see before I played; just click the head-and-shoulders on the right. A new mystery animal will be loaded at 8 PM EDT tonight, and maybe at the same time every day. I will give it another try then. Maybe I'll learn a few things about taxonomy! -via Metafilter
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