The rarer the answer, the deeper it goes
A trivia game with no answer key. Every prompt is open, so hundreds of replies are correct, and the only thing that separates them is how few other players thought of yours. Name a bird and most people say eagle; name a potoo and the krill drops through six bands of ocean towards the trench floor.
Trivia usually rewards knowing the answer. Here the answer is free and the work is in knowing which one everyone else will skip.
That makes a broad vocabulary more useful than a specialised one, and it makes the score a measurement of other people rather than of the subject.
Every accepted response lands in one of six bands, and the bands are named rather than numbered: Plankton at ten points, then upward through the water column to One in a Krillion at a hundred. The names are the only place the game explains itself, and after two dives you can read a friend's result from the tier alone. A perfect set of seven is 700, which the game draws as 7,000 metres of descent.
A prompt like “Name a river” or “Name a cheese” has no single answer, and the game accepts anything that genuinely fits. What it will not do is tell you whether your reply was common. That feedback only arrives after you commit, which turns the twenty-five second clock into a private argument between the answer you know best and the answer you suspect is unpopular.
Points are converted to metres at a flat rate of ten per point, and the krill descends through drawn bands: sunlight, twilight, midnight, then the trench. Because the drawing is continuous, the difference between a Plankton dive and a four-tier one is something you see rather than something you read off a card. The floor sits at 7,000 m, which is exactly a perfect dive and no further.
Multiplayer comes in two shapes. A private room seats up to twelve people on the same prompts at the same moment, and each round reveals what everyone answered once the clock closes. A challenge link works the other way: it turns your finished dive into a link anyone can open later, then lines your answers up against theirs prompt by prompt. Neither requires anybody to host or moderate.
Beyond the shared daily set there is an unlimited mode that deals fresh prompts on demand, an archive that keeps every past day numbered in order, and themed packs that stay inside one subject such as geography, sport or film. The archive is the part that changes practice: instead of meeting a random set, you can go back to a specific day and find out whether the prompts were hard or you were.
02
One field, six bands, and a depth that reads at a glance.
Nothing is scored on how obscure the fact is. The only question is how many other players wrote the same word, so a plain answer can beat a clever one.
Plankton to One in a Krillion covers the ten-to-hundred range. The vocabulary replaces a progress bar with something you can say out loud.
A near-miss spelling is flagged for confirmation rather than rejected. A reply that is not a real answer is refused, and the refusal costs only the seconds.
Everyone answers the same prompts on the same clock. When a round closes, the room sees all twelve replies with the points each one paid.
A dive can be turned into a link a friend plays later, then compared round by round. It works across time zones without anybody waiting.
The archive keeps old sets in order, so a specific day can be replayed. Themed packs do the same for a single subject instead of a date.
03
Four moves, seven prompts.
An open question appears with a single field under it. The clock starts as soon as the prompt is on screen.
Type anything genuinely correct. Confirm the spelling if the game asks, and send it before the countdown empties.
The answer is placed in one of six bands, and the krill sinks ten metres for every point. The band, not the reply, is what you remember.
After seven prompts the dive ends at a total out of 700. Share the depth, replay an old day, or open a room for friends.
04
Three habits from people who play the daily set.
Twelve of us play the same prompts and the reveal is the whole event. Somebody always names the obvious answer and then watches four people beat it.
I go back a month at a time to see whether the prompts got harder or I did. Usually it is me, and the depth curve shows it before the total does.
The film pack is where I do best, because I know which titles everyone will reach for. The geography pack is where that trick stops working.
05
Rarity, rooms and the modes that sit outside the daily dive.
The field takes one answer and the clock takes twenty-five seconds. Whatever you type, the ocean will tell you how many people agreed.
Begin the descent