Food & drink

Origin is the column that wins rounds

Five of the six food topics grade you on a country or region of origin, and it is the column players under-use. Genre-style traits — is it fried, is it sweet — split the pool in half at best. Origin splits it into twenty pieces. If your opening guess is doing one job, make it a well-travelled one: a dish or a chain whose home country you are certain of, so a red cell there is as useful as a green.

The six topics

Fast Food Chains

Country, signature item, store count and founding decade. Store count is an ordered scale — hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands — so yellow means you are one tier off, and that alone separates the global giants from the regional favourites. Founding decade is ordered too: most of the American giants land in the 1940s–1950s, which makes them a clean anchor for your first guess.

Coffee Drinks

Base (espresso, filter, instant, cold brew), how much milk, serving temperature and origin. Temperature is ordered from iced to hot, so a yellow there is genuinely narrow. The classic mistake is opening with something exotic; open with an espresso-based, hot, milky drink and let the three columns push you outward from there.

Desserts & Sweets

Origin, base ingredient, form and serving temperature. Form — cake, pastry, frozen, pudding, candy, biscuit — is the fastest column to green, and once form and origin agree you are usually choosing between two famous options.

Fruits

Colour, origin region, sweetness and whether the skin is eaten or peeled. Sweetness runs tart → mild → sweet → very sweet as an ordered scale, so yellow points a direction. The peel column is quietly powerful: it splits the whole topic almost in half, and nobody ever gets it wrong once they think about it.

Street Foods

Country, main ingredient, whether it is handheld, and cooking method. This is the most international topic in the family — dishes from dozens of food cultures — and the handheld column is the cheapest information in the game: almost every street food is, so a "no" result is a huge narrowing.

Candy Brands

Parent company, main ingredient, country and launch decade. Parent company is the insider column: a green on it tells you which corporate shelf you are standing at, and those shelves are small. Launch decade is ordered and skews old — a surprising number of household chocolate bars are pre-war.

A quick worked example

Say the topic is Desserts and you open with Tiramisu: origin Italy, base cream, form pudding, served cold. The board comes back with origin ✕, base 🟩 cream, form yellow, temperature 🟩 cold. That single row tells you: not Italian, definitely cream-based, one step from pudding on the form scale (so cake or frozen), served cold. Guess two is essentially a choice between two families rather than a stab in the dark — and that is what six guesses is for.