Krillion Scoring: How the Six Tiers Work

A worked example: one full dive

Here is a made-up but typical day. The player lands two easy answers, a few middle tiers and one lucky tier 6. The points come straight from the table above.

That dive scores 255 points. The ceiling is 700: 7 prompts at 100 points each for a tier 6 on every one, which almost nobody manages. Our player reached about 36% of it. Notice where the room for improvement is. Swapping the 2 tier 1 answers for tier 3 answers would add 40 points, while the single tier 6 on its own was worth 100. Lifting your weakest prompts out of tier 1 is usually easier than hunting for one more krillion-level answer, and it adds up just as fast.

Why rare beats right

In most quiz games the hard part is being correct. In Krillion, being correct is the starting line. Because everybody faces the same prompts on the same day, the most famous answers get typed by almost everyone, and the game prices them accordingly. The skill being tested is knowing a topic well enough to step past its front row. A player who knows ten examples of something will nearly always outscore one who knows the three best-known examples, even though both are equally "right".

How the game decides what is rare

According to the game's FAQ, the answer lists are built by pulling together sources such as dictionaries, wiki pages and encyclopedias, then merging and cleaning the results. Rarity is set per prompt. Some prompts are scored mechanically against a database of how familiar each answer is, while others use language-model assistance followed by a manual review. In practice that means rarity tracks how familiar an answer is to people in general, not how hard it was for you personally to think of.

The too clever trap

Every topic has an answer that people pick precisely because they think it is obscure. The game has a name for this: too clever. It is the go-to "rare" pick that so many players reach for that it is not rare at all, so it scores far below what its reputation suggests. If an answer feels like the obvious choice for showing off, assume everyone else had the same idea and go one step further.

The krillion gem

Tier 6 is not simply the least common answer on the list. Past a certain depth, the FAQ explains, the top answer is picked for how fun and satisfying it is to land on, not for rarity alone. That is why the tier 6 answers on our day pages often have a small story behind them, and it is worth reading the notes under each table even when you did not reach that tier.

Depth and your final result

Krillion presents your score as a dive: the more points you collect, the deeper you go, and the end screen sums up how far down you got. You do not need to track the exact conversion while playing. Every tier you gain on a prompt is extra depth, and the totals above are a fair way to compare one day with another.

Scoring tips that actually move the total

• Before typing, name the answer everyone else will give, then rule it out.
• Go one level more specific: a subtype, a region, an older name.
• Be wary of the famous obscure answer; it is often the too clever one.
• Fix your weakest prompts first, as the example above shows.
• Review yesterday's tables in the archive to see where tiers really fall.

For a gentler way into each prompt, try the three-level hints. For everything else about the rules, modes and menus, see the Krillion wiki.