Scoring

Krillion scoring: rarity tiers, depth zones and hint penalties

Everything that turns your seven answers into a depth, on one page.

The five rarity tiers

Tier	Points	What it means
🫧 Plankton	10	The answers almost everyone gives first.
🐟 Schooler	30	Well known; you thought for a second.
🦑 Rare	60	Most people know it exists, few say it under pressure.
🏮 Deep Cut	85	You know your subject.
🌟 One in a Krillion	100	One specific answer per prompt, the deepest cut. Usually comes with a fun fact.

A miss (time ran out, no accepted answer) scores 0 and shows as ⬛ in your share card. Seven prompts, so the maximum is 700.

Depth zones

Every point is 10 metres. Your total decides which zone you reached — the same divisions oceanographers use.

Zone	Depth	Score
Sunlit zone	0 m – 200 m	0 – 19 points	Warm, bright, crowded. Everyone starts here.
Twilight zone	200 m – 1,000 m	20 – 99 points	Light fades. Lanternfish and the first strange shapes.
Midnight zone	1,000 m – 4,000 m	100 – 399 points	No sunlight at all. Anglerfish carry their own.
Abyssal zone	4,000 m – 6,000 m	400 – 599 points	Near-freezing plains of soft mud and sea cucumbers.
Hadal trench	6,000 m+	600+ points	Only snailfish and amphipods live this deep. One in a krillion.

Hint penalties

When the clock runs out you can flip up to three hints on a single 60-point answer. Each flip adds 15 seconds of air and lowers whatever you finally score in that round:

Hints flipped	Penalty	A 60 becomes	An 85 becomes
0	−0%	60	85
1	−10%	54	77
2	−25%	45	64
3	−45%	33	47

How tiers are assigned

The original game ranks answers by how many of its own players gave them. We don't have that data, so our tiers are editorial: each answer bank was drafted with a language model, then run through mechanical checks — no duplicate answers after normalisation, exactly one One-in-a-Krillion per prompt, tier shares within set bounds, and a rule that a country's own capital, national dish or national animal can never sit below Schooler — and finally spot-checked by hand. We say this plainly because it's the honest difference between this site and the original. If a tier looks wrong, the reveal screen shows the whole bank; tell us and we'll fix it.

What counts as a match

Answers are compared after trimming, lower-casing, removing accents and punctuation, dropping a leading "the/a/an" and stripping a simple plural. So Sao Paulo, São Paulo and the São Paulo all match. Common aliases are accepted too (NZ for New Zealand, Burma for Myanmar). A single-letter typo triggers a "did you mean…?" check instead of a rejection — it only counts if you confirm.

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