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Metazooa (metazooa.com)
107 points by furtively on Aug 19, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 21 comments



I was super obsessed with biological taxonomy in middle school—something about the trees and hierarchies was really satisfying. Would've loved this game back then but now it's just frustrating.


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Fun but "dog not found in database" is a bit surprising.


Lol I had the same problem, I just ended up guessing "wolf" they're almost the same animals.


They're the same species, so for this game they are the same animal.


Yeah, this was infuriating considering what the word was.


Especially since they have it in the description of the genus Canis >:-(


Wow I am terrible at guessing. Very educational though. Nice work. I also really appreciated how it saves your state so it persists on reloads.

I wonder if there are other things that have such a well documented and defined taxonomy that we could use for similar games.


This might be my favorite wordle/geo guesser/semantle variant.

Maybe spoiler: 9 guesses, but I wasted some not realizing cats are more closely related to orcas than chimpanzees.

End maybe spoiler.

Wish I could play more right now instead of waiting 24 hours.


    > Wish I could play more
You can: https://metazooa.com/practice


Creator of Metazooa here. Thank you guys for the feedback! I wouldn't have thought to post it on Hacker News, it's so cool to see some traction here.


5, but I feel like I cheated because the classification was specific enough while saying “animals like _____, _____, and _____” and the answer was the third one.


Here is the link to the instructions: https://metazooa.com

It's not obvious from OP's link how to get there - you have to click on the turtle. I didn't realize until I read the comments here that this is a Wordle-like and your goal is to guess today's animal.


They seem to be using common names from NCBI taxonomy. For example, "cattle" instead of "cow".


That was great! Went through the whole thing for the day and guessed the word in 13 guesses. :)


> 500 internal error: Animal "dog" not found in database.

Okay then


I tried the same and then the answer was not far from it! Frustrating


"katydid" not found in database


does that mean katydidnt?

i had heard and used this word growing up, but i don't think i had actually ever seen it written until now.


The forced light, gradient, skull-burningly-bright background is a turn-off.

Devs, don't force people to suffer through your "pretty" backgrounds.


Can you please make your substantive points constructively? It's fine to offer suggestions for improvement but if you come across as putting down someone else's work, that's bad for the culture here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html




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