Ladle Food Game: How the Tiles and Clues Work

The Ladle food game gives you six tries to name one dish, and every wrong guess teaches you something. Each guess comes back as seven tiles comparing your dish with the answer, from cuisine to spice. It lives in the Mosey app next to two other daily puzzles, and a new dish arrives every day.

What is the Ladle food game?

Ladle is a guess-the-dish puzzle. The answer is a real dish, such as something you might see on a menu, and you work toward it by guessing other dishes. The game only accepts dishes it knows, so a spelling slip never costs you a try. You pick from suggestions as you type.

You do not need an account to start, and nothing in it costs money. The games are for people aged eighteen and over, with no prizes, and a new puzzle turns over at your own local midnight.

Ladle tiles explained: what each column tells you

Every guess becomes a row of seven tiles, and each tile compares one trait of your guess with the answer. A pale tile is a match, a copper tile is close and a dark tile is no match. An arrow points toward the answer, and a symbol on each tile means color is never the only clue.

• Cuisine: close means the same family or region, such as two South Asian cuisines.
• Origin: a match is the same country; otherwise the tile shows the distance and the direction of the answer.
• Main: the main ingredient.
• Course: starter, main, dessert, snack or drink.
• Veg: whether the dish is vegetarian.
• Allergy: close means you share at least one allergen with the answer.
• Spice: a scale from zero to three, where one step away counts as close and the arrow says hotter or milder.

The in-app example compares pho with pad thai: same part of the world, nearby origin, the same kind of main ingredient and course, and spice one step off. A first guess should be a dish that tests as many columns as possible.

Ladle clues and hard mode

Clues arrive only when you have earned them. After the third wrong guess, the game tells you the region of the dish, such as South Asia or Southern Europe. After the fourth, it adds a one-line clue that describes the dish without naming it.

Hard mode changes the rules. Every guess must keep the matches you already have, and the clues are switched off. You can only turn it on or off before your first guess. It suits people who want a stricter puzzle and do not mind fewer hints.

How does Ladle pick the dish of the day?

The daily answer leans toward familiar dishes. Each dish has a familiarity level for each market, from household names to deep cuts, and most days the answer is a household or well-known dish. A deep cut can appear a couple of days a week at most, and never on two days in a row, so a tough day is always followed by an easier one. Every dish in the game remains guessable.

If you do not know what to type, Browse dishes lists the dishes by cuisine, with each cuisine's region beside it, and you can search by name. Dishes you have already guessed are shown but cannot be chosen again.

A plan for the six tries

Treat the first two guesses as questions. Pick a dish from a different cuisine family each time and read the tiles: if the cuisine tile is dark both times, you can rule out two families. Use the origin arrow to narrow the map, then use the course and main tiles to settle the shape of the dish.

By the third guess you should have the region from the game itself. At that point, choose a dish that could actually be the answer instead of a probe. If you reach the fourth guess with a clue in hand, read it slowly; clues are written to describe the dish without a name, and they often rule out half your list.

What should you do after a solved puzzle?

Take thirty seconds to look at the dish you just met. If you have eaten it, think about where, and who you were with. If you have not, note it as something to try. The result screen is a good moment to jot down one dish you would like to taste this month, because a puzzle that ends in a plan is more useful than one that ends in a score.

Why a food puzzle helps you eat better

Ladle teaches you the shape of a cuisine, not a list of recipes. After a few weeks you notice which dishes share a region, which share a main ingredient, and where spice levels climb. That makes menus easier to read and makes it more likely you will try something new.

Mosey is a food app for finding, rating and sharing places to eat. A dish you meet in Ladle can become a rating by the dish when you eat it, so the puzzle and your own record feed each other.

Add a tag to each rating, keep a list of dishes you want to try, invite a friend to add to it, and follow people whose taste you trust. The daily food games overview covers all three puzzles, and Ladle and Ingredient with Southern plate dishes shows the puzzle at work on one cuisine. The daily food games page sums them up, and the US food guides list where to eat.

Get the Mosey app, play today's Ladle and rate the next dish you eat by name, so the puzzle and your own list start to feed each other.