The short answer
Most guess the food games online are either Wordle-style word games, such as Foodle and Phoodle, or photo games, such as FoodGuessr and Tastedle, that ask which country a dish comes from. In the word games you spell a hidden food word in a few tries, with coloured tiles showing which letters fit. The photo games show you a dish and ask for its country, with clues you can unlock.
Several unrelated games share the name Foodle. Daily Dish has you spell a recipe's name from its ingredients, Sporcle hosts food picture quizzes, and Meridish, the game behind this site, asks you to pin the town or city where each dish was born. Every game in the table below runs in a web browser and costs nothing to start.
Meridish · the daily food geography game
Seven dishes a day. Tap the map where each one was born.
Free in your browser. A new menu arrives every day at midnight UTC.
The games at a glance
| Game | You guess | Clues | Guesses | Cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Foodle (foodlegame.net) | A food word of five, six or seven letters | Coloured tiles, plus up to three hints that each use a guess | 6 | Free, no account |
| Foodle (MiniBreak) | The name of a dish, four to nine letters | Coloured tiles, a free country-of-origin hint, letter and photo hints | Not stated on its page | Free, no sign-up |
| Phoodle | A five-letter food word | Coloured tiles, then a food fact about the answer | 6 | Free, with an optional free account |
| FoodGuessr | The country or region a dish comes from | Photo, ingredients and a description; a compass and warmth after each miss | 5 per dish, 5 dishes a game | Free with ads; optional paid premium |
| Tastedle | The country a dish comes from | Photo, with ingredient, method, flavour and timing clues that cost points | 6 | Free, no account |
| Daily Dish | The name of a recipe | Ingredient clues and coloured letters | 5 | Free, no account |
| Sporcle food quizzes | Foods shown in pictures | Images, against a timer | Depends on the quiz | Free tier with ads and limits; paid membership |
| Meridish | The town or city where a dish was born | Photo and a written clue; points for distance | One pin per dish, seven dishes a day | Free in your browser |
Foodle: one name, several games
The games called Foodle come from different people, and they share Wordle's coloured tiles: green for a right letter in the right spot, yellow for a right letter in the wrong spot and grey for a letter that isn't in the answer.
The Foodle at foodlegame.net gives you six guesses at a food word of five, six or seven letters. You can play the daily word, which changes at midnight in your time zone, a new word every hour or unlimited rounds. Up to three hints reveal clues such as the word's origin, and each one costs a guess. Solve the puzzle and you get a short story about the food. The game is free and needs no account.
MiniBreak's Foodle asks for the name of a dish, four to nine letters long. It shows the dish's country of origin for free, and you can spend hints on the first letter, the last letter or a photo. Besides a 50-level Journey mode it has a daily challenge of 12 dishes and a co-op mode where friends share one board. You can play it free in the browser with no sign-up.
An Android word game from Roi X5 Productions uses the name too, so a Foodle score from a friend could come from any of them.
Phoodle
Phoodle comes from Julie Loria, a cookbook author, who announced it on Instagram in May 2022. Martha Stewart posted her finished puzzle that same month. You get six tries at a five-letter word, and the answer can be an ingredient, a cooking technique or a kitchen gadget. After you play, a Phoodle Fact about the word appears. You can play without signing up, and a free account carries your stats between devices.
FoodGuessr
FoodGuessr serves three short food games each day. Classic asks where in the world a dish comes from, Cuisine Match asks you to pick the right dish for a country's cuisine, and Plate-Off asks which of two plates people preferred. Finish all three in a day and your super streak grows.
Classic runs five rounds with no time limit. Each round shows a photo of a dish, its ingredients and a short description, and you get five guesses at the country or region. A miss brings up a compass pointing at the answer and a warmth reading for the distance, and after two misses the game reveals the dish's name. A first-try answer scores 5,000 points and each extra guess costs 1,000, though a near miss earns some of that back.
FoodGuessr treats some places with their own food culture as countries, such as Greenland and Hong Kong, and splits the United Kingdom into its four nations. The game measures distance between the closest borders of your guess and the answer. You can play free, with ads and an optional premium subscription, and sign in with Google or Discord to join the leaderboard.
Tastedle
Tastedle also asks for a country, with more weight on reading the food. You look at a photo of the day's mystery dish and type the country you think it comes from, with six guesses. Clues cost points: you can unlock the main ingredients, the cooking method, the flavour and when people eat it. Each dish starts at 5,000 points. The right country keeps every point you have left, the right sub-region earns half and the right continent a fifth.
Its makers found that most food "guess the country" games played like map quizzes, and they wanted ingredients and cooking methods to work as clues. It's free, needs no account and has an unlimited mode, plus side games such as Connections, where you sort 16 dishes by country.
Daily Dish
Daily Dish points the Wordle grid at recipe names. You read ingredient clues and get five attempts to spell the name of the day's dish, with the same green, yellow and grey letters. Its archive holds more than 365 recipes from cuisines including Italian, Indian, Mexican and Japanese. It's free and needs no account.
Picture quizzes on Sporcle
For picture quizzes, try Sporcle. Its food category lists more than 11,000 quizzes with about 98 million plays between them, and some are picture rounds where you name foods from images against a timer. Some come through Sporcle's Quiz Lab, which Sporcle says it doesn't verify or maintain, so check a quiz's rating before you start. The free tier has ads and some limits, and the paid Orange membership removes the ads.
Meridish
Meridish is a daily food geography game. Every day everyone gets the same seven-course tasting menu: Aperitif, Street food, Starter, Soup, Rice & noodles, Main and Dessert. For each dish you see a photo, read a clue and tap the map where you think it was born. The answer is a town or city, and the clue never names the place. If you'd rather type, "Find a place" lets you search for a town or city.
Each course scores up to 100 points, with the full 100 for landing within 25 km of the hometown, so a menu is worth 700. After each course you see how you compare ("Closer than X% of players") and everyone else's average distance. You share your result as a spoiler-free emoji line. A menu takes about three minutes, it's free in your browser, and a new one arrives every day at midnight UTC. Practice mode serves random dishes when you want more. The how to play page has the scoring in full, and the dish pages show where every dish served so far was born.
Meridish · the daily food geography game
Seven dishes a day. Tap the map where each one was born.
Free in your browser. A new menu arrives every day at midnight UTC.
Which one to play
| If you enjoy | Start with |
|---|---|
| Wordle-style grids and food vocabulary | Phoodle or Foodle at foodlegame.net |
| Naming dishes, with the country as a hint | MiniBreak's Foodle or Daily Dish |
| Guessing a dish's country from a photo | FoodGuessr |
| Reasoning from ingredients and cooking methods | Tastedle |
| Picture quizzes against the clock | Sporcle |
| Pinning a dish down to its town or city | Meridish |
A word game and a map game pair well, since one tests what you can name and the other tests what you know about where food comes from. Meridish fits beside either, and it asks for a finer answer than the country games. For map games without food, the daily geography games guide covers Worldle, Globle and others.
Getting better at guessing where food comes from
Read the ingredient list like a map. Tastedle's example is fish sauce and lemongrass, which point to Southeast Asia. Olive trees grow in a Mediterranean climate, and frost stops them at the northern edge of their range, so a dish built on olive oil leans toward places with hot summers and mild winters.
Tomatoes, potatoes, maize and chilli peppers came from the Americas and crossed the Atlantic after Columbus's voyage of 1492, and the Portuguese brought chilli peppers to India. A dish that depends on one of those crops took its present form after that exchange, so you can use them to date a dish and weigh rival origin stories.
For spices, think about trade routes. Cloves and nutmeg grew in the Maluku Islands and black pepper came from India. European buyers in the Middle Ages paid high prices for them, through Arab merchants in the Levant and the trading cities of Venice and Genoa, so if a dish leans on far-off spices, look along those routes.
Then use each game's feedback. In FoodGuessr a miss still gets you a compass bearing, and in Tastedle the right continent still earns a fifth of the points, so you can open with a broad guess in the middle of a likely region. For the word games, foodlegame.net suggests opening with vowels and watching for repeated letters. In Meridish, settle on the country first, then ask which of its towns fits the clue.
Questions
What is Foodle?
Foodle is a name several unrelated food word games use. Most give you six tries at a hidden food word, with Wordle's coloured tiles. The one at foodlegame.net offers five-, six- and seven-letter words, and MiniBreak's Foodle asks for the name of a dish.
Is there a Wordle for food?
Yes, several. Phoodle, made by cookbook author Julie Loria, gives you six tries at a five-letter food word, and so do most of the Foodle games. Daily Dish gives you five attempts at a recipe's name, with ingredient clues.
What is the food guessing game?
The phrase covers several kinds of game. Foodle and Phoodle are word games, FoodGuessr and Tastedle ask for a dish's country, and Sporcle hosts food picture quizzes. In Meridish you pin the town or city where each dish was born.
Is there a GeoGuessr for food?
FoodGuessr is the closest by name. You guess the country or region of a dish over five rounds, with a compass and a warmth reading after each miss. Tastedle is similar, with clues you unlock. Meridish has you tap a world map and scores you by distance, down to the town or city.
Are guess the food games free?
Every game in the comparison table is free to start in a browser. FoodGuessr runs ads and sells an optional premium subscription, and Sporcle's free tier has ads and limits, with a paid Orange membership. The rest cost nothing to play.
Is Phoodle the same as Foodle?
No. Phoodle is one game, made by Julie Loria, and Foodle is a name several developers use. Both are Wordle-style food word games.
Meridish · the daily food geography game
Seven dishes a day. Tap the map where each one was born.
Free in your browser. A new menu arrives every day at midnight UTC.
Sources
- Foodle, the game and its FAQ and terms and conditions.
- MiniBreak, Foodle: guess the dish, Wordle-style.
- Roi X5 Productions, Foodle on Google Play.
- Phoodle, the game and its how-to-play panel; TODAY, 'Phoodle' is the Wordle for food lovers, and Martha Stewart is a fan; Tasting Table, There's a new food game for Wordle fans.
- FoodGuessr, daily challenges, Classic and its how-to-play rules and terms of service.
- Tastedle, the game and its FAQ and About Tastedle.
- Daily Dish, Recipe guessing game.
- Sporcle, Food quizzes, Food 4x4 image grid quiz and memberships.
- Wikipedia, Columbian exchange, Spice trade and Olive.