How to play Price Year, Open Range and Pricele 1000
Three new daily price games: date a grocery receipt, give a price range, or score out of 1,000. The rules, the scoring and how to get better at each.
Pricele now has three more daily games. Each one tests a different way of knowing prices. Price Year asks when, Open Range asks how sure you are, and Pricele 1000 asks how close you can get with a single guess. All three are free, reset at your local midnight and count towards the one streak on Today.
Price Year
You get five receipts. Each lists three U.S. grocery or gas prices from the same year, somewhere between 1980 and 2025. Guess the year. A correct year scores 200, one year off scores 175, and the score falls to nothing at eight years off. The best total is 1,000.
No one price gives the year away, so read the three together. Gas is the best anchor. It stayed under $1.40 a gallon through the 1980s and 1990s, averaged over $3 in 2008 and over $4 in 2022. Eggs are the best trap. They spiked in 2015, fell back, and spiked again from 2022. Coffee was cheaper in 1993 than in 1980, so a low coffee price does not mean an early year.
Every receipt is chosen so that no year four or more away has similar prices on all three lines. If a receipt looks ambiguous, the answer is in the line that does not fit.
Open Range
Five prices, each from a different country. Instead of one number you give a low and a high. If the real price lands inside, you score up to 100, more the narrower the range. A miss scores nothing, though the game tells you how close you were.
Width is the high divided by the low. A range of $2 to $4 is 2x wide and scores 67. A 1.25x range scores 89. Anything 8x wide or more scores the minimum of 10, and you cannot go wider than 12x.
The trick is to be honest with yourself. A range from the typical price divided by 1.5 to the typical price times 1.5 lands about three times in five. Tighten it when you know the country runs dear, like Switzerland or Norway, or cheap, like Egypt or India. Widen it when you do not.
Pricele 1000
This is the daily Pricele without hints. Five prices from five countries, one guess each on a slider, scored by how close you are. Each round scores up to 100. A guess 1.75 times too high or too low scores nothing. Round three counts double and rounds four and five count triple, so the total is out of 1,000 and the last two rounds decide most games.
The slider starts at the typical price across all countries, which is shown on the card. Start from there and move it by what you know about the country. A rich country with high wages pushes services like a haircut or a cappuccino up much more than it pushes a can of Coca-Cola. We explain why in why poor countries are cheap.
When you miss a day
- The games archive replays every past puzzle of every daily game. Archive plays are saved apart from today's and never touch your streak.
- The answers page lists every game's answer for each day with the figures behind it, two days after the day ends so nothing that is still live gets spoiled.
- All games lists the full set, including Price Atlas, Higher or Lower Daily, Then & Now, Inflation Ladder and Rent Ratio.
More guides
- What groceries cost the year you were born, and what they cost in workEggs, bread, gas and coffee in 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2010, from BLS average prices, and how many minutes of work each took then and now.
- Groceries take 24% less work than in 1980, and 12% more than in 2020A fixed basket of 12 U.S. groceries and gas took 112 minutes of work in 1980, 76 in 2020 and 86 in 2025. Both halves of the grocery argument are right.
- Only three groceries got harder to buy since 1980Of 15 U.S. groceries BLS has priced since the 1980s, only ground beef, eggs and bacon now take more minutes of work. Bananas take 58% less.
- How to compare two countries without fooling yourselfCost-of-living comparisons go wrong in the same six ways every time. What follows is a method that survives contact with a real decision.