Yes, I had some sense that goto might be a little hacky, but I didn't know how to use subroutines. Obviously, they are the magic answer I needed. Also, I did use strict and use warnings while I was working on this, but after I knew it would work, I didn't bother pasting them in here--why? Who knows; however, I now see the error of my ways.

Looking at your for loop, I have a question. How does this handle the situation in which the player does successfully guess the answer in under ten tries? Since you have set the loop to run ten times, it looks like it will print "you have x guesses left" and wait for guess input even after you have won the game. I have just run the code and seen that this is not the case, but I can't figure out why. (Also, it looks like the "guesses left" line needs to be removed from the if statements, since you have put it at the top of the for loop. But this is a simple matter.)

Here is another question: why do I have to chomp $again, but not chomp $guess?