Mapdle shows you one Call of Duty multiplayer map a day and gives you five guesses to name it. The first thing you see is a crop of the tactical map, magnified far enough that you are looking at a couple of lanes rather than a layout — usually a corner, and never the middle. Guess, and the camera pulls back a rung.

A wrong guess costs you nothing but the guess. There is no penalty for naming a map from the wrong game, and no reason to hold a guess back: every one you spend buys you a better picture of the answer.

The ladder has four pictures on it and always runs the same way — from the most abstract view of a map to the most flattering one.

You open on a magnified crop of the tactical map. Your first guess zooms that out to the whole overhead layout, which is the rung most days are won on: if you have played the map, the shape of it is usually enough. The third and fourth rungs leave the overhead view behind for a screenshot taken in the map or its loading-screen art. Which of the two you get depends on the map: some have a screenshot rung, and others go straight to artwork.

If you reach your fifth and final guess, the game gives up the title and the year the map shipped in. That last clue is deliberately generous. A day you lose should still leave you knowing which map it was and roughly when you played it, rather than just telling you that you were wrong.

The guess box knows the multiplayer maps of every Call of Duty from the original Modern Warfare in 2007 to Black Ops 7. You can only submit a map that exists in that list, so a typo cannot cost you a guess — if the name is not offered, it is not a map the game knows.

The answer is drawn from a narrower set: maps with competitive history behind them, which in practice means the ones that have been in a CDL, CWL or MLG map pool rather than every map ever shipped. The wider guess list exists so that naming a map you half remember is possible even when it was never a competitive pick.