Krillion basics · 3 min read
Krillion scoring explained
Updated
Krillion looks like a normal trivia game: a prompt appears, you type an answer, the clock runs down. The twist is in the scoring. Being right is only the entry ticket. What you are really scored on is how few other people were right in the same way.
Correct is the floor, rare is the ceiling
Take the prompt “Name a citrus fruit”. Orange, lemon and lime are all correct, and thousands of players will type them. They score, but only a little. Yuzu or kumquat are rarer. Rangpur or citrange are rarer still. All of them are equally correct; the difference is how crowded each answer is.
That is the whole game in one example. Every prompt has an obvious layer, a knowledgeable layer and a deep layer, and your score depends on which one you reach in time.
How rarity is measured
Rarity is social, not absolute. The game compares your answer with what every other player answered to the same prompt that day. An answer is rare because few people gave it, not because it is objectively obscure. That has two useful consequences:
- Famous-but-forgotten answers score well. Mars’s moon Deimos is not obscure, but under time pressure most people say Titan or Europa instead.
- “Clever” answers can be crowded. If an answer is the one every quiz fan reaches for, it stops being rare. The best answers are the ones you know that most other quiz fans don’t think of first.
The rarity tiers
The official game sorts answers into named tiers, from common answers near the surface up to the rarest tier, One in a Krillion. Players describe a ladder that runs roughly Plankton, Too Clever, Schooler, Rare, Deep Cut and One in a Krillion, with each step worth more than the last. Tier names and point values belong to the official game and can change, so check krillion.io for the current list.
Our practice game uses its own ocean-zone tiers so that nobody confuses them with official results:
| Tier | Points | Depth per answer |
|---|---|---|
| 🐙 Abyssal | 100 | 1,000 m |
| 🦑 Midnight Zone | 85 | 850 m |
| 🐠 Twilight Zone | 60 | 600 m |
| 🐟 Sunlit Zone | 30 | 300 m |
| 🌊 Surface | 10 | 100 m |
Our rarity is estimated by hand from how often each answer tends to come to mind, so it is a training tool, not a copy of official scores.
Points become depth
Krillion presents your score as a dive. Each point takes you deeper, so a run of obvious answers leaves you bobbing near the surface while a run of deep cuts sends you into the abyss. In our practice mode every point is 10 metres, which makes a perfect seven-prompt dive 7,000 metres.
Depth is a nice way to compare days, because it rewards consistency. Two 100-point answers and five misses is a shallower dive than seven solid mid-tier answers.
What this means for strategy
Because a miss scores zero and an obvious answer scores a little, the scoring creates a real trade-off:
- Never leave a prompt blank. A surface answer beats nothing.
- Don’t stop at the first correct answer if you have time to find a better one.
- Don’t gamble on answers you’re unsure are correct. A rare wrong answer is still worth zero.
We go deeper into that trade-off in safe vs. rare answers, and into the method for finding the rarer layer in think past the first answer.