How to play
You need the game on one screen, plus a pen and paper (or a mini whiteboard) for each team.
- Choose how many teams are playing and name them. Pick the game options, the categories and the question types.
- Teams take turns to pick. The picking team chooses a tile on the board: a category and a question type. General mixes questions from every category.
- The question appears and the timer starts. Every team writes down a guess, not just the team that picked.
- At Pens down, teams hold up their answers. The host types each guess into the game. For big-number questions, tap a scale (thousand, million, billion…) or exact number for each guess; typing 8bn or 3 million also works.
- Press Reveal. The answer drops onto a number line with everyone's guesses. Closest and furthest points come first, then any Bang on bonuses.
- After the last round, the team with the most points wins.
Question types
🎯 Bullseye: one exact answer, usually a small whole number. Ties are common.
🧠 Know it: a precise fact you either know or half-know.
🧮 Work it out: you can reason your way to it. The reveal shows one way to do it.
🎲 Wild guess: nobody knows exactly. The answer is the best accepted estimate.
How "closest" is measured
📏 Nearest number (Bullseye and Know it): the guess with the smallest gap wins. If the answer is 47, guessing 45 is 2 away and beats 50, which is 3 away.
✖️ Times off (Work it out and Wild guess): for huge or uncertain numbers, what matters is how many times too high or too low you were. If the answer is 100, guessing 20 is 5 times too low and guessing 400 is 4 times too high, so 400 wins.
Points
Closest: +100. If teams tie, they share it.
Furthest: −50, only with 3 or more teams guessing. Ties share the penalty.
Bang on: +50 bonus for an exact Bullseye, or within 5% on any other question.
A team that writes nothing scores nothing for that question.
Quick scoring
With Quick scoring, nobody types the guesses. After the reveal, the picking team taps the closest and furthest teams, and the game shares out the points. The whole group can overrule them.
What is a guesstimate?
A guesstimate, also written guess-estimate or guestimate, is an estimate made without exact information: part guess, part reasoning. Nearo turns guesstimating into a party game.
How many people can play?
Nearo is for 2 to 8 teams, and a team can be a single player. It works for families, friends, classrooms and office team-building.
Can we play it on a TV?
Yes. Nearo runs in any web browser, so you can play on a laptop connected to a TV, or on one phone or tablet passed around the group.
Will we see the same question twice?
Not in the same game. Nearo also remembers which questions have been played on your device and picks unseen ones first in later games. You can clear that memory under Played questions in the game options.
Is Nearo free? Do I need an account?
Nearo is free to play in your browser, with nothing to download and no account to create.