r/PictureGame Celebrates 10 Years

/r/PictureGame is a Reddit/Discord community based around the playing of the eponymous Picture Game. February 15th 2024 marks 10 years since the game first started.

The Game involves players taking turns to solve and then host rounds. A round of the game involves posting a picture to the subreddit and asking a question in the title. A typical round involves asking for the co-ordinates of a location in the picture. Players will then try to be the quickest to use Google and other search engines to find out the information they need to narrow down the location. Other round types involve Puzzles, where the host will ask the players to solve a puzzle they've made. There are various other types of rounds and new types of round are created quite frequently, especially from new players.

At 12:29pm on February 15th 2014 (UTC), /u/Oh_Bruddah posted the first round of the Game to r/Pics.

This round was solved by /u/Goat_47_, who recognised that this was Newport, Oregon.

Eventually, the Game was moved to its own subreddit, /r/PictureGame. Initially, winners would log into the /u/PictureGame account, but this was obviously not viable long term as trolls and mishaps meant new accounts had to keep being created. It was decided that winners would host rounds on their own accounts.

You can look at the stats for the game on the website Picturega.me. This is possible due to the work of several people, notably /u/Provium, in setting up a bot that tracks all the rounds and winners. Using this site we can see that 7223 unique accounts have solved a round.

As of writing this, there have been 133,514 rounds in total.

The Game has seen 29 people hit 1000 or more rounds total, with 7 people having solved multiple 1000s of rounds.

I found out about r/PictureGame from an r/Askreddit thread asking about niche subreddits. I was immediately fascinated with the game. My first solve was on August 22 2016, when I solved the below round by /u/amboyscout.

I wound up solving 14 more rounds from August 2016 to January 2017, before moving on from r/PictureGame.

I returned briefly in 2018 and 2019, but it wasn't until September 2021 that I really got back into the game. On October 23 I hit 100 wins, part way through my "New Zealand Election" series where each round featured finding a location in each New Zealand electorate.

On July 19 2022 I hit 200 wins.

On May 4 2023, I hit 300 wins.

This round by /u/judethedude781 looks like just a picture of a cat, but if you look closer you'll be sent down a rabbit hole of various clues that lead you to being able to solve it. This is currently the most upvoted round.

This round by /u/TheRealBoyo shows a common round type where people will post a meme and ask for you to find the location.

This round by /u/cpc2 is cool because they've created a photosphere actually on google maps that you have to find using hints from the photo.

This round by /u/p-27 is an example of a very difficult round.

This round by /u/punchingcatto which is one of my favourites and which won the 2022 PG Best of Award for "Best Sh*tpost with a Solve Path".