ABOUTThe rules, the scoring, the questions
How Bracket works
Bracket is a daily estimation game. Most trivia asks whether you know a number. Bracket asks how well you know what you don’t know: instead of guessing a figure, you set a range you’re confident the answer falls inside — and the tighter you dare to make it, the more it pays.
A round
- 5 questions a day, the same for everyone, new at your local midnight.
- 25 seconds a question. When the clock runs out, whatever is on the gauge is locked in.
- One round a day. You can’t replay a question once you’ve seen its answer.
- The first question of the day is the gentlest; they get harder from there.
Scoring a bracket
Every question has a gauge, and your bracket covers some share of it. If the answer lands inside, you score — the narrower the bracket, the more:
| Bracket covers | Pays |
|---|---|
| 5% of the gauge | 361 |
| 10% of the gauge | 324 |
| 25% of the gauge | 225 |
| 50% of the gauge | 100 |
If the answer lands outside, the question pays nothing — unless you only just missed, in which case you keep a small share of what your bracket was worth.
The Bullseye
Once a day you can drop the bracket and commit to one exact value. It’s a long shot taken against the clock, with a magnified vernier scale for fine adjustment. A guess counts if it’s close enough to the answer or close enough across that day’s gauge — whichever is more generous — so a question spanning a vast range gets a fairer target:
| Years & percentages | Other numbers | Or across the gauge | Pays | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bullseye | exact, or 1 off | within 2% | within 0.4% | 1,200 |
| Inner ring | within 3 | within 6% | within 1.2% | 500 |
| Outer ring | within 8 | within 15% | within 3.0% | 200 |
A perfect day — four perfect brackets and a dead-on Bullseye — is worth 2,800. Nobody has managed it yet.
Where the questions come from
Every question is written by hand, around one rule: your honest gut answer should be wrong, but the real answer should feel obvious once you see it. The fax machine was patented before the telephone was invented. A Greenland shark can live for 400 years.
Each figure is a stable, well-documented one — not a statistic that changes every year, and not one where sources disagree by more than the gauge can absorb. Where estimates vary, the note under the answer says so. Questions are rated by how far an honest guess tends to land from the truth, then scheduled so every day climbs from easy to hard and no subject repeats within a week.
Every finished puzzle is published in the archive, with the answers, the stories behind them, and how players did.
Fair play
Answers never reach your browser until you’ve locked in, scores are calculated on the server, and the clock is enforced there too. There are no accounts: putting a name on the all-time board is optional. See the privacy page for exactly what the game stores.