Cheese or Font? – Online Trivia Game

Cheese or Font is a speed quiz that asks one question twelve times: is this word a cheese, or a font? Taleggio. Optima. Esrom. Corbel. You get six seconds each. It sounds easy until you notice how many cheeses sound like typefaces, and how many typefaces sound like something you'd put on a cracker.

A game takes about two minutes. Play solo, or send a link and go head-to-head with a friend on the same twelve names. It runs in any browser, with no sign-up.

How to play Cheese or Font

1. Pick a mode. Play to go solo, Play online to send a duel link, or Same device to take turns on one phone.
2. Read the name. One word shows up in big letters.
3. Tap Cheese or Font within six seconds. Let the timer run out and you're marked "too slow," which scores the same as a wrong answer.
4. See what it was. After each name you get a one-line note, like "A Danish washed-rind cheese named after an old monastery" or "A sans-serif font that ships with Microsoft Office."
5. Play all twelve. Every game has six cheeses and six fonts, shuffled. Your score is out of twelve. In a duel, the higher score wins.

Play solo or as a two-player trivia duel

Whoever you invite joins with a name and nothing else. Their duel is on the house, and it doesn't count against their own free games for the day.

Cheese or font? Sample names and answers

Try these before you scroll back up to the game. They're all in the question pool, and the notes are the ones the game shows.

• Mimolette: cheese. A bright orange French cheese that looks like a cantaloupe.
• Bembo: font. A serif typeface based on lettering from 1490s Venice.
• Morbier: cheese. A French cheese with a thin dark line through the middle.
• Frutiger: font. A sans-serif typeface first made for signs at an airport near Paris.
• Kashkaval: cheese. A yellow cheese popular in the Balkans.
• Avenir: font. A geometric sans-serif whose name means "future" in French.
• Cotija: cheese. A crumbly, salty cheese from Mexico.
• Rockwell: font. A chunky slab-serif typeface.

The pool holds 20 cheeses and 20 fonts, and each game pulls six of each, so you'll see new names for a while.

Names that fool almost everyone

A few names trip up nearly every player. Didot sounds like a soft French cheese, but it's the high-contrast serif you've seen on fashion magazine covers. Danbo sounds like a playful display font and is a semi-soft cheese from Denmark. Trajan sounds like it should come with a rind, yet it's the all-caps font based on Roman carvings that shows up on movie posters. Tilsit could pass for a modern sans-serif. It's a semi-hard cheese.

Then there are the near misses. Goudy is a font, not Gouda. Bree is a font, not Brie. Cambozola, on the other hand, is a cheese.

What's a good score?

The game ranks you at the end. Under six, it suggests keeping you away from cheese boards and font menus. Six or seven is "about as good as a coin." Eight to ten is impressive enough to be suspicious. Eleven or twelve means you're either a cheesemonger or a graphic designer.

If you like quick rounds with a twist, try Real Law or Fake Law next. For a group race, Which Costs More works for a whole group. You'll find all three on our trivia games online page, along with the rest of our top free online games.

Tips for a better score

• Think about where you've seen it. If the word feels like it belongs in a drop-down menu in a word processor, it's probably a font. Corbel, Candara, Cambria and Constantia all came from Microsoft.
• European place names lean cheese. Lots of cheeses are named after a town or region. Fonts are more often named after a person or an idea.
• Don't freeze. A guess is right half the time, and a blank never is.

Why this quick trivia game is funny

A coin flip would score around half, and it's easy to do no better. The game pokes at a weird corner of general knowledge. Graphic designers suddenly feel very confident, cheese lovers get smug, and everyone else is guessing. The notes after each answer teach you something along the way, like which font Apple used for years.

The six-second timer doesn't leave room to think it over, so wrong answers come fast. It fits a coffee break or a waiting room, and it makes a quick duel with a partner over text. It also works as a warm-up round if you're putting together virtual game night ideas for a group.