Can You Beat the Average Player? Our Scoring System Explained

The average Price is Correct player finishes a session with around 3,200 points. The top tier consistently clears 5,000. The difference isn't luck — it's a systematic understanding of how the scoring works. Here's everything you need to know.

Every day, the game presents three individual products and one showcase round. The total available points across a perfect game — exact guesses on every product, exact showcase guess, all without going over — is 7,000. Nobody hits that consistently. But knowing what that ceiling looks like, and how each component contributes, changes how you think about every guess you make.

The 7-Tier Heat System

Each product guess returns one of seven heat responses. These aren't just emotional feedback — they encode a specific proximity range and drive the points you can earn on that product:

The key mechanic: each product gives you up to three guesses, and your score for that product is determined by your best result across all three. You're not penalized for using all three guesses — but there's a strategic cost to burning them carelessly, which we'll come back to.

The 10% Bonus for Not Going Over

One of the most underused rules in the game: if your final guess on a product is below the actual price — even if you're in the "Cool" or "Cold" range — you receive a 10% bonus on your points for that product. Guessing under is always strategically safer than guessing over when you're uncertain.

This creates a specific asymmetry. If you're genuinely unsure whether a product costs $300 or $350, guessing $295 might seem like a wasted guess. It's not. If the real answer is $320, you get Cool (within ~10%) plus the 10% under-bonus — which effectively puts you in Very Hot territory for the same proximity. The under-bonus is a free risk reduction tool that most players ignore entirely.

The Showcase — Where the Game Is Actually Won

The daily showcase is worth up to 2,000 points — more than any single product, and nearly as much as two products combined. It's a set of items presented as a bundle, and you get one guess at the total price. No heat feedback. No second chance. One guess, one result.

The showcase scoring works on the same proximity tiers, but at double the point values. An Exact showcase guess awards 2,000 points. A Scorching result gives 1,600. A Cool result gives 400. The stakes are dramatically higher, which means showcase performance is what separates the 3,000-point players from the 5,000-point players.

Because you only get one guess and there's no feedback loop, showcase strategy is different from individual product strategy. You can't bracket. You can't use early guesses to learn. You need a single, well-considered number — and then you need to add your deliberate buffer on top of it, because bundle prices run systematically higher than player estimates for reasons covered elsewhere on this blog.

The 3-Guess Mechanic — When to Burn vs. Conserve

Having three guesses per product sounds like a luxury. It's actually a trap if you misuse it. The trap is this: players who make three confident guesses on every product tend to play less strategically than players who think about whether a particular product warrants three guesses.

Here's how to think about it. Your first guess is your anchor — your best estimate before any feedback. If you get Scorching or better, you don't need guesses two and three. Consider not using them, especially if your first guess was under (capturing the bonus). Chasing an exact hit from Scorching by guessing again is rarely worth the risk of accidentally overshooting and losing the under-bonus you already earned.

If your first guess comes back Cool or Warm, that's a meaningful signal. Use guess two to bracket aggressively — move toward the real price with a calculated jump, not a timid shuffle. If guess two lands Warm or better, evaluate again: are you still under? Is the bonus secured? Sometimes locking in a Warm + under-bonus beats risking it all for a Very Hot without the bonus.

What It Actually Takes to Score 5,000+

To consistently score above 5,000, you need to be doing all of the following:

• Landing Very Hot or better on at least two of three individual products
• Collecting the under-bonus on at least one or two products per session
• Hitting Scorching or better on the showcase at least half the time
• Using your three guesses strategically — not burning all of them on every product regardless of how the first one lands

The average player at 3,200 is typically landing Warm on most products and Cool-to-Warm on the showcase. There's no single breakthrough needed — it's a series of small upgrades across each component. Improve your showcase from Cool to Warm. Collect the under-bonus more consistently. Land one Scorching per session. Each of those moves adds several hundred points.

The game rewards deliberate attention more than raw price knowledge. You can score 5,000 with imperfect price memory if your strategy is tight. You can score 3,000 with excellent price knowledge if you play carelessly. The system rewards the combination.