How to play Bracket
Five questions with a number for an answer. Don’t name the number — bracket it. Drag two handles so the answer sits between them: narrow and right scores, wide is safe and worth nothing. One set a day, on the second shelf, outside the daily line-up.
Play today's Bracket · Watch the gameplay demo
The rules
- Each question has a track under it — the range the answer must lie in — with two handles on it. Drag the handles so the answer sits between them, then Lock in.
- If the answer is inside your bracket, the narrower the bracket, the more it scores: 100 minus the share of the track it covers. A bracket covering a tenth of the track scores 90; half of it scores 50.
- If the answer is outside, the question scores nothing, however close the miss. The whole track is always safe, and always worth zero.
- Every track is chosen for its question. Some run in powers of ten — the readout says logarithmic track — so a tenth of the track can be a whole order of magnitude.
- Five questions a day, from dates and distances to counts and quick arithmetic. Your score is the average of the five, out of 100.
- One set a day. Your progress is saved question by question, so a refresh is not a second attempt; the archive holds every past day.
Strategy
- Decide what you know before you touch the handles. A date you can place within a decade is worth a tight bracket; one you can only place within a century wants a wide one. The game is calibration, not knowledge alone.
- A miss costs everything, a wide bracket costs a little. On a 325-year track, 50 years is still worth 84. Give yourself the room your doubt needs, and no more.
- Anchor on what you do know. The Eiffel Tower was built for a Paris fair, and Paris fairs were a late-1800s thing; the Moon is a few hundred thousand miles, not a few thousand or a few million. Reason to a range, then bracket it.
- On a logarithmic track, think in orders of magnitude. A bracket from 100,000 to a million covers one order of magnitude; on a track spanning four, that is a quarter of it.
- The readout tells you what a bracket is worth before you commit. If it says 60, ask whether you are really that unsure.
Scoring
A question scores 100 minus the percentage of the track your bracket covers, if the answer is inside it; nothing if it is outside. Your score for the day is the average of the five questions, out of 100. Five brackets each covering a tenth of their tracks, all holding the answer, is 90; four of those and one miss is 72. Bracket sits outside the daily line-up, so its score never moves your day’s total.
Full details on how scoring works.