One of my favorite morning rituals is a shot at Cardle. Wordle? No, Cardle. Cup of coffee in one hand and my phone in the other, I try to guess what car is in the photo every day, based on close-ups. It’s satisfying to get it right on the first try and flex in a group chat, especially when a bunch of my car nerd friends also play it.
There are two different sites for Cardle: Playcardle.com, which we’re calling “US Cardle” in this piece, and Cardle.uk, which we’ll call “UK Cardle”. The premise is similar – guess the car! – but there are some differences.
Let’s start with US Cardle. You have to guess the make, model, and year in five tries, using two drop-down menus and a field where you enter the year, with a two-year plus-minus leeway for getting it right. The site rates your guesses with green and red blobs, and it’s nice to have a streak going on with repeated successful guesses day after day.
Generally, since the site seems US-based, I tend to adjust my Car Brain so that Nissan Primeras become Infiniti G20s and year-by-year differences are US-biased. To explain, a BMW E28 M5 can be a 1988 car, and a Peugeot 405 cannot be newer than a 1991 model. My shortcomings are usually that I cannot tell different late-model SUVs apart, but sometimes the closeups have a bit of a badge showing, and I’ll just run with that.
The other site is UK Cardle. Here, we have a fundamentally different approach – you have five tries to guess the make and model, but the year doesn’t matter. You type the car name in manually, based on five close-ups.
Compared to US Cardle, UK Cardle is markedly worse. The site seems automated – I’m sure the US version also has some sort of script to help run it – but that makes it wildly inconsistent.
Sometimes you have to type the whole car name in the correct order (for example, “Vauxhall Chevette HS 2300,” as “2300 HS” isn’t accepted), and other times, the spec doesn’t matter, and the site only accepts make and model.
For instance, on Sunday, the first photo showed a green wagon with a bit of wood trim, so naturally, my guess was “Morris Minor Traveller.” Nope, that’s not the answer the site wanted. Maybe “Morris Traveller”? No, that’s not it either.
Could it just want “Morris Minor”? That’s right! And the correct answer the site printed out? “Morris Minor 1000 Traveller”! But somehow that’s not what it wanted me to type. What a world!
Somehow, that’s not even the worst example. The other week, the correct answer for an obvious Honda NSX wasn’t “Honda NSX” but … “Honda NSX 9.” What even is that?
The answer is: the file name of the Wikimedia photo that the site pulled. Honda NSX 9.jpeg. I’m not making this up. Incredible!
Of course, the whole site is just something somebody cooked up for fun and likely doesn’t spend too much time fine-tuning it. But come on, it should be consistent, and accidentally including and requiring parts of FILE NAMES makes for infuriating playing.
I still play it every day, but among my group of friends, it’s become either a sport of spotting how wrong it is, or then completely avoided to save the trouble. Obviously, I take it seriously, but that’s the nature of car nerd-dom sometimes.
Do you play one of these Cardles? If you do, great! If I’ve now introduced a new headache in your life, sorry!
[Top image by author]
Tried these but i found another called dailycarquiz.com and they have cardle + other variations/games that are cool too
Mercedes better get today’s game on the first guess!!!