Rules
How to play
7 prompts a run, 25 seconds each, one answer per prompt. Rarer answers sink you deeper. Every point is ten metres and a flawless run is 7,000 m.
The rules, exactly
- A prompt appears and a 25-second clock starts.
- You type one answer. Enter submits it, and so does the clock running out.
- The answer is scored into one of six tiers based on how rare it is. The score is revealed immediately.
- An answer the set does not contain is refused. It costs the seconds you spent, nothing else.
- After 7 prompts the run ends and your total becomes a depth.
Tactics that actually work
Go to the edge of the category, not the middle
Asked for a country in Europe, the middle of the category is France and Germany, and everyone lands there. The edge of the category is where the points are: a small member state, a country people forget is in Europe, a place that only just qualifies. Edges are rare precisely because the category boundary is doing the work for you.
Answer the qualifier, not the category
Most prompts carry a condition that quietly shrinks the pool. A country with no coastline, a river outside the famous ones, a fruit that is not a berry you would find in a supermarket fridge. Chase the condition rather than the category and the obvious answers eliminate themselves.
Your first answer is the school's first answer
If it arrived instantly, it arrived instantly for everyone. The first answer you think of is almost always the shallowest tier on the prompt. Treat it as a floor, not a target — then spend five of your seconds looking for its neighbour.
Careful with the clever-sounding answer
There is a reliable trap: the answer that feels obscure but is the standard piece of trivia everybody learned once. It reads as a deep cut, so it gets named constantly, and it scores barely better than the obvious one. If you can explain why it is interesting, so can everyone else in the same second.
Spend the clock, but do not waste it
A refusal is free, so an empty box is the only real loss. If nothing comes, type the best answer you have rather than letting the clock run out — a shallow tier still beats nothing.
What the depth means
Depth is your score, shown as a descent through the real layers of the open ocean. The boundaries below are the standard oceanographic ones, not invented numbers.
| Layer | Depth | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Sunlight Zone | 0–200 m | Light still reaches. Familiar answers live here. |
| Twilight Zone | 200–1,000 m | Too dim for photosynthesis. You are past the obvious picks. |
| Midnight Zone | 1,000–4,000 m | No sunlight at all; only bioluminescence. |
| Abyssal Zone | 4,000–6,000 m | Near-freezing and near-empty. Few runs reach it. |
| Hadal Zone | 6,000–11,000 m | The trenches. A flawless dive ends here. |
The points available on each prompt are on the scoring page.