How scoring works

Every game is marked out of 100, whatever it is. Add them up and that is your day.

The day's line-up

Each day Noggin sets every game on the shelf, the same for everybody, and each is worth up to 100 — so the day is out of 100 per game. That is deliberate while the shelf is small and we are still listening: a rotation would mean each game is seen by a fraction of players on a fraction of days, and we would rather hear about all of them. When the shelf is big enough that playing all of it is a chore, the day becomes a selection again.

When rotation returns, the games will be drawn from a bag rather than picked at random each morning: every game shuffled in, dealt out, and the bag refilled only once it is empty — so every game comes up before any game comes up twice. A game cannot sit out for a fortnight because the dice were unkind.

Your day's score is the total of the line-up, out of games × 100. It is a sum, not an average: skipping a game leaves the day short rather than quietly rescaling what you did play — and the figure beside your score on the shelf always says what the day is out of, so it stays right as the shelf grows.

Why one scale

Ordering six countries by land area and solving a logic grid have nothing in common, so any "score" for either is invented. What matters is that the two inventions are comparable — a 90 should mean roughly the same amount of "that went well" whichever game it came from, or adding them up is meaningless.

So every game is marked on the same 0–100 scale, and the shape is the same everywhere: 100 is a perfect round, and everything below it is earned rather than granted. Nothing is given for turning up.

Spectrum

Six tiles, three checks. Correct tiles lock as you find them.

A board you did not finish still scores for what you got right. Because the tiles lock as you go, that count is everything you found across all three checks, not just the last guess. Four of six is as close as a failed board can get — find five and the sixth has nowhere else to be — which is why the ceiling there is 33.

Rung

Rung cannot be failed: the climb ends when you reach the goal word. What varies is how far past par you wandered.

Par is the shortest climb the dictionary allows, with the day’s leap in hand — the leap being Rung’s once-a-day move of two letters at once, at a cost of two rungs. Par is computed against every word the game accepts, leap included, so it cannot be beaten; matching it means you found an optimal route.

An undo counts as a rung. It still rescues you from a dead end, but the climb you take back stays on your scorecard, like a stroke in golf. Undoing a leap gives the leap back. Reset keeps every climbed rung on the card — it resets the ladder, never the score. Typing a word the game does not accept still costs nothing — only real climbs count.

Vault

A hidden code and seven guesses. Scored against the puzzle's par — the number of guesses a good solver needs on that particular code plus a little room, worked out by simulation when the puzzle was made and printed above the board before you start.

Beating par is not worth more than matching it. Par is already what a good solver needs, and the days you come in under it owe as much to the code sitting near your opening guess as to anything you did.

A locked-out board is scored on how many symbols you had exactly in place at your closest. That can never reach what a solve is worth, and the game's own shape is what prevents it rather than a rule: a row with every symbol exactly in place is a solve.

The palette size and code length change from day to day, which is what makes some days harder than others — but par changes with them, so the score stays comparable.

Deduce

Twelve cells, three checks, three hints. Solving starts from a base set by how many checks it took, then the clock and any hints adjust it.

So a perfect Deduce — first check, no hints, inside seven minutes — is exactly 100. A careful eleven-minute solve with nothing else against it is 90.

The clock only counts when you solve it. There is no reward for failing quickly, and piling a slowness penalty on top of a failure would be unkind.

A spent grid cannot score near a solve, and the puzzle's own shape is what prevents it rather than a rule: every value is used exactly once down a column, so three right in a column forces the fourth. Half the grid is the most a wrong grid can hold.

Mini

The crossword on the second shelf is scored on the same scale but sits outside the day’s line-up: its number is kept for you and shown on its own sheet, and it never moves the day’s total. Every solve starts at 100.

So a clean solve inside two minutes is 100; six minutes with one check is 64.

Blink

Also on the second shelf and outside the line-up. Ten rounds of spot-the-change; the eye is what is scored, not the clock.

So ten clean rounds is 100; seven found and three rounds lost to a wrong tap is 64.

Connect

Ten trails a day on an 8×8 grid, 115 dots in all (seven dots to sixteen; the last four trails cross themselves); the score is the share of the trail you remembered.

So ten perfect trails is 100, and a slip on the last dot of the sixteen-dot trail still pays for the fifteen before it: 99.

Trace

Three rounds — trace, recall, mirror — each scored 0–100 for the form of the drawing: it is slid and scaled onto the shape first, so where it landed and how big it came out never matter.

So a tracing at 100 with 70 and 60 from memory is 72. A different shape altogether stays in the forties however neatly it is drawn.

Practice rounds and replays

Only your first, genuine attempt at a day's puzzle is scored. Playing a finished puzzle again is welcome and changes nothing — your score, your streak and your statistics all stay where they were. The results sheet will tell you how the replay compared.

The archive

Every past day's puzzle is there to play, from the Puzzle archive button on any results sheet. A day you never played scores the first time and the score sticks, counting toward your all-time total — but it is a puzzle played late, not a day you showed up for, so it never mends a broken streak.

Streaks

Your streak counts consecutive days on which you played anything at all — one game out of the line-up is enough to keep it. A day where life got in the way of the rest should not wipe out a month.

Today not being finished yet never breaks it. Until you open a puzzle, the streak is measured up to yesterday, so it does not read zero every morning.

Daily average

The middle number on the shelf is your average day: each day's line-up total, averaged over every day you have played. Games outside the line-up are not in it, and a day you played from the archive counts like any other.

A word on the numbers

These curves are considered guesses, not laws. Nobody has yet played enough Noggin for us to know what an average Deduce looks like, and when we do, these are likely to be adjusted so that a score means the same thing across games in practice and not just on paper. Old scores are kept with a record of which version of the rules produced them, so nothing has to be thrown away when that happens.

Scoring version 2, in effect since 15 August 2026.