How To Play the Guess the Price Game
Each round shows one famous thing that really sold at auction. You get the name, a one-line description and the year it was made or found, not the price.
Move the slider until the dollar amount feels right, then press Place bid. The slider runs from one thousand dollars to about one billion, and each step multiplies the price instead of adding a flat amount. That is so a dinosaur skeleton and a painting can share one control.
After you bid, the game shows the reported sale price, the auction house and the year. Your points land underneath. Then the next lot appears. A full game is 10 lots, picked from a longer list, so a second play is not the same set.
What Your Score Means
Every lot is worth up to 1,000 points, so a perfect game is 10,000.
- An exact guess: all 1,000 points for that lot.
- Off by about ten times: you still earn some points. Guessing 5 million on a 50 million sale is in the game.
- Off by about a hundred times: that lot is worth zero. A million-dollar guess on a hundred-million-dollar painting misses the scale.
A score above 7,000 means your guesses kept the right number of zeros. A score under 4,000 means a few lots jumped a whole category of money. Your best total is saved on your device. The share button uses that total, not a made-up rank.
Tips To Improve
- Think in jumps, not dollars. Ask if it sold for thousands, millions or hundreds of millions before you fine-tune.
- Bones and jewels are not the same as paintings. The most expensive paintings in this list sit far above a famous fossil.
- Read the year. A sale from the 1990s can look cheap next to one from the 2020s, even when the object is legendary.
- Play twice. The second round drops some lots you just learned and brings in others.
Where the Prices Come From
Each figure is a reported auction result, not a private handshake and not a guess. The reveal names the house: Christie’s, Sotheby’s or Julien’s Auctions. When a report rounded the number, the note on the result says “about.” Nothing here is a prediction of what the same object would sell for tomorrow. Prices move, and a second sale of a similar thing can land far from the number in this list.
