Quanto: a price-based Wordle
At the beginning of the year, I designed Quanto, a game following the Wordle formula—a global game every day with statistics—and it involves guessing the price of six products from Spanish supermarkets.
The game has had more impact than I expected and has already reached 50,000 games, a number that made me wonder if my humble home server would cope. So far, it works without problems (the load doesn't even reach 0.01% at the nightly peak), and I can continue to make it available without any advertising.
The products are randomly chosen every Sunday from the websites of Carrefour, Lidl, Alcampo, and Mercadona. In addition to the photo, all come with their name and additional information such as weight or volume. For each product, we have two attempts to guess the price, with a clue to try to get closer on the second attempt:
| Message | Deviation |
|---|---|
| Right on the first try! | 0% |
| Almost, a little more | Less than 15% below |
| Almost, a little less | Less than 15% above |
| Way too high | At least 15% below |
| Way too low | At least 15% above |
At the end of the game, certain statistics are shown, like the average percentage of deviation and the typical message of "you are above 60% of the players". To calculate this message, it is necessary to store the scores of all games and use them to calculate percentiles; something like ordering the scores from lowest to highest and cutting them into 100 similarly sized pieces.
Observing these percentiles and making statistics by product is very interesting, and the only conclusion I can draw is that most of us have no idea about the prices of what we buy. In uncommon products, deviations are usually very large.
For example, half of the users would pay €7 for a dye that costs €2.50. Surely if there is more variety of dyes and brands in the supermarket, we can get an idea of the real price of the product, but many chains have a single product for many specific needs.
If I feel like it someday, I'll use all the game statistics to put a more detailed analysis of our perception of prices here, but for now, I want to use this post to ask for your suggestions. If you've read this far, what else would you like to add to Quanto?
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