Daily games
Movie Cast Quiz: Daily Film Guessing and Grouping Games
Two puzzles a day, both built from the same verified cast records as the reference pages: name the film from its cast, then sort sixteen actors into the four films they belong to.
INT. SOUND STAGE — LATER
A cast list is a reference document and it is also a puzzle, because the interesting thing about a cast is rarely the lead. It is the third name down that turns out to have been in something else entirely, or the comedian who shows up for ninety seconds in a film nobody associates them with. Both games below are built on that, and both draw on exactly the same records as the cast pages rather than a separate quiz-shaped copy of them.
Everyone gets the same two puzzles on the same day, and neither one needs an account. Progress and streaks are kept in the browser and nowhere else, so clearing site data resets them and nothing is recoverable, which is the trade for having no sign-up at all.
Guess the film from its cast
Five clues, revealed one at a time, moving from the year of release towards the names most people would recognise. Every clue is a fact from the film's own record: the year, the studio, the director, and then the cast, least widely known first. The film is one of 46 in the tracker's pool, all of them titles that set up a sequel, whether or not it ever arrived.
This game needs JavaScript. It reveals five clues about one film (year, studio, director and two cast clues) and accepts either a typed title or one of four options. The films it draws on all have a tracked sequel, so each answer has a page of its own: the sequel tracker lists every one of them, and the film index carries the full cast lists the clues are taken from.
Four films, sixteen actors
Sixteen performers, four films, four to a film. The catch is that plenty of these actors are plausible in more than one of the four on the board — a comedy ensemble and an action sequel can look interchangeable from a list of names, so the grouping has to come from knowing the films rather than from the shape of the names. Every board is checked when it is built: no actor in a board appears in more than one of the pool's films, so each name has exactly one defensible home.
This game needs JavaScript. It presents sixteen actors and asks for the four groups of four, one group per film, with four wrong attempts allowed. The films are drawn from the same pool as the guessing game above; the actor index is the reference behind it, and the film index holds the cast lists in full.
How the puzzles are built
The cast records come from Wikidata, pulled by the same script that feeds the cast pages, and the puzzles are generated from that pull at build time rather than assembled by hand. That matters for a reason specific to cast data: a film's record reliably says who was in it and unreliably says in what order. Billing order is missing on all but one film in this pool, so nothing here is arranged by star billing, because doing so would mean inventing it.
What stands in for it is how widely known each performer is, measured as the number of Wikipedia language editions that carry an article about them. It is a blunt instrument and it is honest about being one: it ranks overall fame rather than the size of a part, which is why a famous cameo can turn up as a late clue. It is used only to sort recognisable names above obscure ones, which is all a fair difficulty curve needs.
A third game was planned and is still not built, though the reason has changed. The intended board was a three-by-three grid asking for an actor who appears in both of two films, a format that works for football because a player accumulates five or six clubs across a career. Film actors mostly belong to one film each: of 1,027 performers across 46 films and 1,121 credited roles, 82 appear in more than one, and only 95 of the 1,035 possible film pairings share even a single name.
That is now thin rather than impossible: 20 complete boards can be assembled from this pool. What rules the format out is what those boards play like. The typical cell admits exactly one performer, so the question stops being "name anyone who was in both" and becomes "name the one person who was", which is a memory test with a single accepted answer rather than a puzzle. The grouping game took its place because cast data has the property that one needs: groups that genuinely do not overlap.
Films in the pool with a full cast list here
26 of the 46 films the games draw on also have their complete credited cast published on this site. The games and the cast pages are built from the same verified pull, so a film that turns up as a puzzle can be read in full straight afterwards.
- Aladdin
- American Ultra
- Aquaman
- Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice
- Baywatch
- Captain Marvel
- CHiPs
- Christopher Robin
- DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story
- Fight Club
- Focus
- Furious 7
- Geostorm
- Inside Out
- Jumanji: The Next Level
- Power Rangers
- Quantum of Solace
- San Andreas
- Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens
- Step Up: All In
- Suicide Squad
- The Lego Ninjago Movie
- Titanic
- Transformers: Dark of the Moon
- Vacation
- X-Men: Apocalypse
Questions about the games
How often do the games change?
Both change once a day, and everyone gets the same puzzle on the same date. There is no account and no server: the date itself selects the puzzle, which is why two people can compare results. The film game runs through all 46 films before any repeats, and the grouping game has 30 boards in rotation.
Where does the cast data come from?
Structured cast records from Wikidata, pulled by the same process that builds the cast pages on this site. Nothing is written from memory. What that data does not reliably carry is billing order (it is absent on all but one film in the pool), so the games never claim who the lead was, only who was in it.
Why does the last clue sometimes name an actor with a tiny part?
Because the clue order is built on how widely known each performer is, not on how large the role was, and those two things come apart. Chuck Norris appears in DodgeBall for a moment and is more famous than most of its actual cast. The clue says he is in the cast, which is true, and stops short of calling him the star, which would not be.
Can the answer be typed instead of picked?
Either way. Four options appear alongside the input, and the text box accepts partial and approximate titles: accents, missing punctuation and common short forms all resolve. Where a guess genuinely fits two films in the pool, it asks which one was meant and costs nothing.
Is a wrong guess always punished?
No. Only a guess that resolves to a real, wrong answer costs a clue. Typing something that matches nothing, or something ambiguous, is free: the aim is to test film knowledge rather than spelling.
Are the games playable without JavaScript?
No, and the page says so rather than showing an empty frame. Everything else on this site works without it. What sits here in that case is a description of each game and links to the reference pages the puzzles are drawn from.