Rarest Answer Game

What is a rarest answer game?

A rarest answer game is a trivia game where every question has many right answers and the one fewer people know scores more. The rarest answer game on this page is Rarest, made by the independent team at rarest.me. Each prompt asks you to name something, for example "Name a lake in Europe" or "Name a breed of dog". Any correct answer counts, but a well-known one scores almost nothing and the rarest answer scores the most.

That one rule changes how a trivia game feels. In most quizzes there is a single hidden answer and you race to remember it. In a rarest answer game there are dozens or hundreds of right answers to every prompt, and the puzzle is to find the one known to the fewest people. In Rarest your score lifts a hot-air balloon: the rarer your answers, the higher it climbs, past the Statue of Liberty's torch, the summit of Everest and, with a perfect round, up to the orbit of the Space Station.

How to play the rarest answer game

1. Press Play, then Take off. Each round of Rarest has 7 trivia prompts and is the same for every player on the same date.
2. Read the prompt and type a guess. Every prompt starts with "Name a…" or "Name the…". Type any answer that fits and press Enter, or tap Launch.
3. Beat the clock. You have 25 seconds per prompt. A wrong guess costs one second and you can try again until time runs out. Small typos, missing accents and plurals are accepted.
4. See whether you found the rarest answer. After each prompt the game shows the tier you landed in, where your answer ranks among all accepted answers, the best-known answers and a few of the rarest.
5. Use your Thermal once. Tap Thermal ×2 before you answer and that prompt scores double. Save it for a subject you know well.
6. Land and share. At the end you get your altitude, your points and a row of coloured squares you can share. The squares never reveal your answers.

Controls

• Keyboard: type your guess and press Enter.
• Mouse: click the answer box, then Launch, Thermal ×2 or Pass.
• Touch: tap the answer box to bring up the on-screen keyboard, then tap Launch.

How scoring works in this rarest answer game

Every correct guess lands in one of six tiers, named after how hard the balloon's burner fires. A prompt you pass, or run out of time on, scores 0.

Inferno is the tier for the rarest answers on a list. Seven of them make a perfect round of 700 points. Because one doubled prompt can swing the total, when you use the Thermal matters as much as what you guess.

How the game decides which answer is rarest

The answer lists in Rarest are not written by hand. According to the developer, each prompt is built from Wikidata, the open knowledge base behind Wikipedia: if something belongs to the category and has an English Wikipedia article, it is accepted (in the very largest categories, the best-known few hundred). Rarity is calculated from public Wikipedia statistics: how often an article is read, how many other articles link to it and how many languages it exists in.

Two things follow from that. A guess can be perfectly correct and still be refused if Wikidata files it under a different category. And "rarest" means the rarest in the data, not the least chosen by today's players, so the tier for an answer does not change during the day. Other rarest answer games work differently: some score you against what other players typed, which means the same answer can be worth more in the morning than at night.

Rarest answer game modes

• Daily: one numbered round per day, the same seven prompts for everyone, one attempt. Reloading the page resumes your round. It changes at midnight in your own time zone.
• Unlimited: seven fresh prompts every time, as many rounds as you want. Use it to practise after you finish the daily round.
• Categories: limit the trivia to geography, animals, food and drink, sports, movies and TV, music, science or history.
• No timer: switch it on under Options to think as long as you like. Shared results say when a round was played without the clock.

All four are free and none needs an account.

Tips for finding the rarest answer

• Throw away your first guess. We answered "Lake Geneva" and got 5 points. If a guess arrives instantly, it arrives instantly for everybody.
• Bank something when the clock is low. A Flicker still beats a 0, and a wrong guess only costs one second.
• You cannot repeat an answer in a round. The game refuses a guess you have already used, so do not burn a strong answer on a prompt where it scores poorly.
• Read the reveal. After each prompt the game lists a few of the rarest answers. Those are the ones worth remembering for your next rarest answer game.
• Hold the Thermal for your best subject. Doubling a 100-point guess is worth more than doubling a safe one.

Other rarest answer games

Krillion is the daily trivia game that made the rarest answer game popular; our Krillion guide explains how it works. Rarest follows the same idea with a different theme and scoring, and the two are separate games by separate teams. On this site you can also play Nobody Said That, a rarest answer game scored against what other players said today instead of a database. For more, see games like Krillion.

More guessing games

If you want a different kind of puzzle, all our games are on the daily guessing games page.