How to play: the rarer the answer, the bigger the score

The short version, in one line

How to play in one line: a round is 7 questions with 25 seconds each. You type an answer, the page matches it against our list, and rarer answers earn more points. Your best possible round is 10,500 points.

Timing

The clock for each question starts when the question appears, either when you press Start round or when you press Next question. If it reaches zero, the question scores zero and the answer screen shows the most common and the rarest answers on the list. Reloading the page does not reset the clock, because the deadline is saved as a fixed time.

Matching your answer

Capital letters, spaces, punctuation and accents are ignored. Common alternate names are accepted. If your answer is exactly one letter away from a single entry on the list we accept it and tell you. If it is close to more than one entry we do not guess and ask for a fuller name. Anything else is treated as not on our list yet, which costs no points and no time beyond the seconds you already used.

Scoring tiers

Answers are ordered from most common to most unusual and split into six equal tiers: Crowd pick 50, Easy mix 100, Fresh take 250, Deep cut 500, Rare find 900, Legend 1500. The order is an editorial judgement, not a poll of real players, so the tiers are approximate and not comparable with any official score.

Missing or wrong answers

If you think a perfectly good answer is missing, use Report a missing answer during a round. It saves a small file to your device with the question and what you typed. Nothing is sent anywhere unless you email it to us from the contact page.

A worked example: how to play one question

Say the prompt is “Name a college major.” The clock starts at 25 seconds. Business is the first thing most people type, so it sits in the lowest tier and earns 50 points. Sociology or Statistics land in a middle tier. Oceanography or Actuarial Science sit much higher, and a handful of genuinely unusual majors reach the top tier worth 1500.

After you submit, the answer screen shows which tier you reached, the points you earned and a few of the most common and the rarest answers on the list. Use that screen to learn the shape of the list: it shows how far from the obvious you can go before an answer stops being recognised.

Strategy: how to play a full round well

A round is 7 questions, so a single zero costs you more than a single low answer. If you cannot think of anything unusual after about ten seconds, type the safe answer you can spell and take the points. A 100-point answer submitted is always better than a 1500-point idea that never makes it to the box.

Different topics reward different habits, so how to play well depends on the pack. Food and snack questions favour specific brand or flavour names. School questions reward knowing smaller colleges in a state. Music and screen questions reward going past the current chart toppers. The Themed Packs let you drill the topic that costs you the most points.

If an answer is rejected as not on our list, you lose nothing but time. Try a shorter or more common spelling of the same idea first, then switch to a different answer rather than retyping the same one.

Daily Practice, Unlimited and Themed Packs

Unlimited deals a fresh random round every time and puts a game number in the web address so you can share the exact round. Daily Practice deals the same 7 questions to everyone on a given date and numbers each day from #1. Themed Packs draw 7 questions from a single category such as food, campus life or schools. The rules above are identical in all three.

Past Daily Practice rounds are kept in the Archive, so a missed day is never lost.