How to Play

Mark McGwire

Welcome to Celebrity Goo Game, where famous faces have been distorted into caricatures, such as the example at right. The objective is to identify as many of the celebrities as you can. A new goo appears daily.

You'll earn 1 point for every goo that you solve. You can track your progress on the Current Scores page. At the end of each month, whoever has the highest score will win the game and receive a prize.

Celebrity Goos

Each celebrity goo comes with a clue to help you solve it, and a category that represents the celebrity's primary claim to fame. Each goo also has a "intended difficulty" that can guide you as to how to solve it. This difficulty rating is estimated by Scott Hardie, who runs the game, to the best of his ability. There are five difficulties: Very easy goos can usually be solved on sight by most players, easy goos can usually be solved with a single search online, medium goos can usually be solved within a few searches online, hard goos usually require more intensive searching and/or lateral thinking, and very hard goos usually remain obscure even after much research.

Alternative spellings are usually accepted as answers. For a complete list of what guesses are accepted or not, see the Advanced Rules. If you enter a spelling that is not recognized, your guess will be marked "pending" until Scott has a chance to review it and deem it correct or incorrect.

A new goo is published every day. Once published, each goo will remain active for seven days, during which time players may enter guesses. After seven days, the goo will expire and the answer will be revealed.

Scoring

Besides earning 1 point for solving each goo, players can also earn 1 point for creating a goo (see below). A player's score does not appear on the Current Scores page until the player has either solved a goo or created a goo in that month.

All points count towards the month when the goo is published. Each month is considered a separate round of the game.

Player scores are reduced by 1 point for each win by that player in the preceding twelve rounds.

Winner

At midnight when the final goo of the previous month expires, the previous month's winner is declared. That player receives a $25 Amazon gift card by email.

If multiple players tie for the highest score, they will all be declared winners and receive prizes. (A maximum of 10 prizes will be issued, in the order in which players achieved their final point to win.)

If there are pending guesses at midnight when the final goo expires, the winner will not be declared until the pending guesses have been resolved.

Player-Created Goos

To help him run the game, Scott invites players to create their own celebrity goos. After a player submits a goo this way, Scott will review it to style the text like the rest of the site (and on rare occasions alter the goo's solvability if he thinks it's warranted), and then the reviewed goo will enter the queue for future publication. Players can submit as many goos as they wish, and player-created goos are subject to the same randomized process as all goos (the site chooses each day's goo at random with an emphasis on variety of category and difficulty).

Players cannot guess or solve their own goos. Scott solves these player-created goos himself for fun, but cannot earn points or win the game. For more information, visit the page for creating a goo.

Miscellaneous

Besides winning the game, a number of other achievements are honored, such as solving every goo in a single round and being the only player to solve a particular goo. There's also a Hall of Fame that honors the game's very best players.

Some rules in the game are too obscure to list here, since they come up only under very rare circumstances. See the advanced rules for a complete list.

Celebrity Goo Game is run by Scott Hardie, who reserves the right to take any steps to preserve fairness if cheating is apparent, an error occurs on the site, or other unusual circumstances occur. The game is part of Funeratic, a web site with other games, contests, movie reviews, blogs, and a discussion forum. A Funeratic account grants access to all sections of the site.