How it works

Season points

Points are the score. They cannot be bought, sold, transferred between players, or converted at any fixed rate. They exist to decide two things: where you sit on the leaderboard, and what fraction of the prize pool you receive.

There are exactly two ways to earn them.

1. Season puzzles

• A season has a fixed catalogue of puzzles — Season 1 has 1,000 — and no more are ever added.
• You may start one season puzzle every 60 minutes. The clock starts when the puzzle is assigned to you, not when you finish it.
• Solving it early does not shorten the wait. Nor does failing, leaving, or letting the reservation lapse.
• While you hold it, the puzzle is reserved to you alone for 60 minutes. Nobody else can open it or see it.
• If you do not solve it in that hour, the reservation expires and the puzzle returns to the pool for anyone. Your own cooldown still runs from when you took it.
• Solve it and it is claimed permanently: it can never be solved again by anyone.

Season puzzles are worth 10, 15, 20 or 25 points by difficulty.

2. The competition

• A new competition opens every 3 hours on a fixed global schedule, aligned to midnight UTC.
• Each round has three puzzles: Easy, Medium and Hard. They are the same for everyone and everyone can play them at the same time.
• They are worth 1, 2 and 3 points, awarded independently. Solve one, two or all three — there is no bonus for finishing them all and no requirement to.
• You get one attempt at each difficulty per round. Finishing or failing one settles it until the next round.
• Failing one does not stop you playing the others.
• The competition has nothing to do with the season puzzle cooldown. You can play it while you wait.

Hints and mistakes

Every competitive puzzle — season or competition — gives you:

• 2 free hints. Free, capped, and impossible to buy, earn, or extend. There is no advertisement that grants a third.
• 3 mistakes. A wrong digit is a mistake; the third one ends the puzzle with no points. There are no extra lives, no retries, and nothing to watch or pay to get one.

Neither limit applies in practice, which is unlimited on purpose and awards nothing.

Solo or team

You compete either as yourself or as one team of up to 10. A team is a single competitor: its members' points are pooled into one total and it takes one place on the leaderboard.

• You choose before you start scoring, and the choice is fixed for that season.
• Once locked you cannot leave, switch teams, or move points.
• Team points are never also counted as your solo points.
• A team's prize share is split equally between its locked members. Contributing more does not earn you a larger slice of your own team's payout.

How the prize pool is divided

At the end of a season we add up the eligible points of every competitor — solo players and teams alike — and divide the pool in proportion.

So a point has no fixed cash value, and we will never quote one. What we can show you, at any time, is your share of the eligible points so far and what that share would currently be worth. Both move as other people score, and neither is final until the season settles.

Getting paid

• Payouts go out by PayPal after the season settles and the fair-play queue is cleared.
• You need a confirmed email address and a saved payout destination.
• Balances under $5.00 are held rather than sent, because provider fees would consume them.
• Team payouts are calculated for the team, then split equally between locked members.

Advertising

The site is paid for by advertising, which is why the contest can be free to enter. Advertisements appear in natural breaks — after a result, on the way back to the lobby — and never before or during a puzzle.

No advertisement can ever affect a competitive outcome. Watching one cannot give you points, a hint, an extra mistake, a retry, a shorter cooldown or another attempt. Your result and your points are final before an advertisement is shown, and if one fails to load you lose nothing.