How to Play Anamo

Anamo is a guessing game about the human body. A mystery anatomical structure is chosen, a 3D model appears, and your job is to name the structure in as few guesses as possible. Here is everything you need to know to get good at it.

The basic loop

Each round, the game secretly picks one structure — a bone, muscle, blood vessel, nerve, organ or ligament — from its catalog. You type guesses into the search bar, which autocompletes against every structure in the game, so you never need to remember exact spelling. After each guess, that structure lights up on the 3D model in a color that tells you how close your guess was to the answer.

Reading the colors

The color scale is the heart of the game. A guess painted white or pale is far from the target. As guesses land closer, the paint warms through orange to deep red — meaning you are very close. The correct answer flashes green. Distance is computed from the real 3D positions of the structures on the model: each structure has a centroid calculated from its mesh, and the game measures how far your guess's centroid is from the answer's.

Game modes

Difficulty levels

Anamo has four difficulty tiers, from Beginner (major bones and organs everyone has heard of) up to Grad (small carpal bones, individual arteries, deep pelvic muscles). Pick the tier that matches your background — you can change it at any time, and the game only selects mystery structures at or below your chosen level.

Strategy: how good players guess

Random guessing wastes turns. Strong play looks more like triangulation:

• Open with a landmark. A large, central structure — the sternum in the chest, the femur in the leg — gives a heat reading that immediately narrows the search to one part of the body.
• Bracket the target. If the clavicle reads warm and the pelvis reads cold, guess something halfway between and watch which direction warms.
• Think in layers. When bone guesses plateau at "hot but not right", the answer is often a muscle, vessel or nerve at the same location, one layer deeper. Our Anatomy Guide lists each structure's neighbors precisely for this reason.
• Learn the lanes. Vessels and nerves run in predictable corridors — radial artery down the thumb side, ulnar nerve down the pinky side. Knowing the lanes turns one warm guess into a confident next guess.

Sharing results

After a win you can copy an emoji grid of your round — the sequence of colors your guesses produced — and share it anywhere, Wordle-style, without spoiling the answer.

Why it works for studying

Anamo is built on the same idea as spaced-repetition flashcards, but spatial: every wrong guess still teaches you where things are relative to each other, which is exactly how anatomy exams test it. Students preparing for anatomy practicals use Practice mode by region, then test overall recall in Random mode. And if a structure keeps stumping you, read its page in the Anatomy Guide — a fact you can hang a story on is a fact you remember.