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The mechanic / Design notes

Curryillion, the rarest answer game, explained

Curryillion is a rarest answer game: a prompt with many true answers, and a scoreboard that pays for the one nobody else reached for. It is the opposite of a pub quiz. The fact is only the entry fee; the points are in the choice.

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Updated 7 November 2026 7 min read Five rarity tiers

What "rarest answer" actually means

A normal trivia question has one right answer and a lot of wrong ones. A rarest answer game flips that: the prompt has many right answers, and the game asks which one you choose. The scoring then estimates how few other players would make the same choice.

In Curryillion, every prompt ships a hand-checked board of accepted answers, sorted into five tiers. A layup is the answer almost everyone gives first. One in a Curryillion is the single hidden answer — still true, still accepted, and almost nobody's first thought. Everything in between is a measure of how far past the obvious you were willing to go.

Correct is the floor, not the goal. Every answer on the board is correct. You never lose points for being right. You only find out how rare your right answer was.

The five-tier ladder

The ladder is the entire game in one table. Learn it once and every prompt becomes readable: you can feel yourself standing on a rung before you press SHOOT.

The Curryillion rarity ladder
Tier Points How many players reach for it The feeling
LAYUP +10 Almost everyone The name that arrives before you finish reading.
FREE THROW +25 Many Still comfortable, one small step sideways.
THREE POINTER +45 A solid minority You had to know the sport, not just the headline.
HALF COURT +70 Very few You dug into an era or a role most fans skip.
ONE IN A CURRYILLION +100 The single hidden answer Real, true, and nobody else said it.

There is also the brick: no answer, five failed guesses, or a dead shot clock. Zero points, honestly recorded, and it only ever costs you that prompt.

Why rarity scoring beats right-and-wrong scoring

Pure trivia measures memory. Rarity scoring measures memory plus judgement plus nerve. Three answers on a board can all be true, and the one that wins is the one that required the most range to see. That makes the game harder to exhaust: the board is a landscape, not a switch.

It also makes the game kinder. In a normal quiz, an easy prompt and a hard prompt are separated by whether you know the fact. In Curryillion, every prompt has a way in and a way up. A casual fan scores layups; a lifer hunts half-courts; both leave with a number. The scoreboard is not a pass or fail, it is a description.

And it makes the result worth talking about. "I got the answer" is a dead end in a group chat. "I took a +70 on the second prompt and bricked the fifth trying to be clever" is a story.

"Right gets you on the board. Rare gets you on the highlight reel. The game is built to find out which one you were going for."

— The booth, explaining the ladder

How a board gets built

Boards are not scraped lists and they are not player-submitted. Each prompt is written first, then answered in depth in a raw content bank, then split into tiers. Exactly one answer is placed in the +100 tier, so every prompt has a genuine hidden answer rather than a vaguely "hard" one. The smallest tier still contains several answers, so the top of the ladder is a hunt rather than a lottery ticket.

The finished board is then checked so that a listed answer can never be rejected. We are honest about the edges: a 508-player dataset cannot catalogue every deep cut, so a real answer we have not listed yet still scores UNCHARTED +10 and is queued for review. The player's frustration should never come from the game being wrong. It should come from the shot clock.

  • Hand-checked, no dead ends. Listed answers are validated exactly; a real uncatalogued answer scores UNCHARTED +10 and is logged, not rejected.
  • One hidden answer. Exactly one +100 per prompt.
  • Descending tiers. Layup is the biggest bucket; Curryillion is the smallest.
  • Aliases, not guesses. Nicknames and abbreviations are extra inputs; they never overlap another answer.
  • Verified, not hand-edited. The runtime data is generated and checked by content scripts.

How to climb the ladder

  1. Name the obvious answer silently

    Do not type it yet. You now know what a layup looks like, which means you can decide whether the obvious answer is the best this prompt offers — or whether you know a rarer one.

  2. Move one dimension sideways

    Change the era, the conference, the role, the country or the competition. A different angle almost always produces a true answer that is somewhere on the board.

  3. Bank the safe points when the clock is short

    With six seconds left, a layup beats a brick. Rarity is a strategy, not a religion. The players who average the highest scores are the ones who know when to stop hunting.

  4. Remember that the board is fair

    If an answer is true and reasonably well known, it is probably on the board. Trust a genuine basketball memory more than the fear of looking silly — the +100 tier only exists because someone said the strange name.

Survey games vs rarest answer games

The closest cousin to a rarest answer game is the survey show format, where a hundred people are polled and answers are ranked by popularity. The difference is where the authority lives.

Survey format

Popularity is the answer

A live poll decides the ranking. The "right" answers are whatever the surveyed audience said, which is fun but noisy and only works with a captive audience.

Quiz format

Fact is the answer

One answer is correct and everything else is wrong. Great for learning; exhausted as soon as the fact is known.

Curryillion

Rarity is the answer

A curated board ranks true answers by expected rarity. No live poll, no wrong answers, and a score that rewards how far you reached.

The booth answers

Rarest answer game: questions, answered

What is a rarest answer game?

A rarest answer game gives you a prompt with many true answers and scores each answer by how rarely players choose it. You are not asked to find the single correct answer; you are asked to find a true answer that most people will not think of. Curryillion applies that idea to basketball trivia.

How does Curryillion decide how rare an answer is?

Every prompt has a hand-checked board of accepted answers, split into five tiers from Layup to One in a Curryillion. The tier reflects how few players are expected to reach for that answer, so the obvious name is a layup and the single hidden answer is worth +100. Listed answers are validated exactly; a real answer we have not catalogued yet still scores UNCHARTED +10 rather than zero, so there are no dead ends.

Why do rare answers score more?

Because the interesting decision is the second or third name, not the first. If every correct answer scored the same, the game would measure whether you know the obvious fact. Rarity scoring rewards range, nerve and lateral thinking, which is what keeps a daily board interesting after a hundred rounds.

Is the rarest answer always the best strategy?

No. A deep answer only counts if it is on the board, and the shot clock is 24 seconds. Chasing a +100 every prompt leads to bricks and wasted tries. Strong players bank safe points when the clock is against them and spend the brave answer on prompts where they actually know a deep name.

Can I lose points for giving a common answer?

No. A correct answer always scores, even if it is the most obvious answer on the board. A layup is worth +10, not minus anything. The only way to score zero on a prompt is a brick: no correct answer before the tries or the shot clock run out.

What is the maximum score in a rarest answer game?

In Curryillion, 700 points. Seven prompts with exactly one +100 answer each means a perfect round requires seven straight one-in-a-Curryillion answers. It is deliberately rare; a single +100 reveal is a good night.