📐 How the games work

Picks runs on the same ledgers as the prediction hubs: the Premier League and the Champions League (home, draw or away), the NFL and the AP Top 25 college football slate (home or away), and the MLB postseason when October has a series to call. You pick before you see what the model thinks; its probabilities appear only once you have committed.

A correct call

10 points. A correct draw counts the same as a correct win. An NFL or college tie grades nobody correct.

Confidence

Rank your open picks in a league from most to least sure. The top slot is worth as many points as you have open picks in that league; the bottom is worth 1. The slot is a bonus on top of the 10, paid only if the pick lands.

Upset Radar

The five NFL and college games where our model and the betting market disagree most. Side with the model or the market: whichever side scores the better Brier score on that game wins you 25 points. A push scores nothing.

MLB series

Pick a series winner before Game 1 for 25 points. The games themselves run as an ordinary daily slate.

Locking

A game locks at kick-off, or at 00:00 UTC on match day when the kick-off time is not known. A pick counts only if it was made before the lock.

Streak

Consecutive correct calls, across every league, in date order.

Leaderboard

Slate, Radar and series points added together; ties broken by correct calls, then by name. The Model (house) sits on the same board, graded by the same function as everyone else.

Results are never typed in by hand. Each pick is joined to the result the daily predictions run records in the ledger, the same record that grades the models on the scoreboard.

Metro Globle

Find the mystery metro, drawn each day from the top 250 metros, in six guesses. Every guess drops a pin with its great-circle distance in km (mi) and a line pointing toward the target, coloured by proximity: teal from 80 percent, gold from 50, orange from 20, pink below that. Proximity is how much of the 20,000 km (12,427 mi) half-circumference of the Earth the guess has closed.

Metro Grid

A three-by-three grid from sixteen categories (continents, countries, population, economy, teams, skyscrapers, universities). Fill each square with a metro that fits both its row and its column, using each metro once, in nine guesses. A wrong guess costs a guess and leaves the square open. Each square shows how bold your answer was: the share of the 200-metro pool that would also have fitted. Your score is the sum of 100 minus that share across the squares you fill, so rare answers score more. The share is measured against the pool, not against other players.

Sports Grid

Rows are sports, columns are countries or continents. Name a team for each square, nine guesses, each team once. Every day’s grid is checked so each square has at least one real answer. A filled square shows how many teams could have answered it; there is no points total.

Two metros and one measure: population, pro teams, skyscrapers, universities, GDP or big companies. Say whether the second is higher or lower. A tie counts as correct. Right answers move the second metro across and bring in a new one. The order is the same for everyone on a given day, and your best run resets at midnight UTC. Not to be confused with the Higher or Lower in Play & Learn, which is a number-line search game for younger players.

⭐ Starter

Where a game begins for younger players.

🌟 Skilled

The core of most games.

🚀 Expert

A ceiling, not a floor: the hardest setting a game offers. The eight hardest also sit in the Expert tier on the Games page for grown-ups.

The games share one way of scoring an answer. Right and quick (under 2.5 seconds) is gold, “knew it”; right but slower is silver, “worked it out”; wrong is grey, “learned it”, and the answer is shown so a miss is never a dead end. Questions you missed or have not seen come back more often; a question you have answered gold twice rests for a week.

Games set their own rounds on top of that. Flag Flash, for instance, is ten flags at seven seconds each, gold only for a clean find, with a streak that resets on a wrong tap; Times-Table Striker’s Blitz is sixty seconds against your own record.

Daily and endless games

Your guesses and best scores are kept in this browser only. Nothing is sent to us.

Play & Learn

Which questions you have mastered, in this browser only.

Picks, signed out

Your picks live only in this browser.

Picks, signed in

Google sign-in. Your picks and a display name are stored so they follow you and count on the leaderboard. Picks you made while signed out are added on first sign-in, never overwriting one already saved.

GeoSports, by Frank Michael Smith, for the idea of a daily sports geography game built on a handful of well-made questions, and for a how-it-works page thorough enough to be worth imitating. MapTap, which GeoSports itself credits, for showing how a daily game grows into practice modes and themed collections.

The daily formats owe their shape to Globle and to Immaculate Grid. What is ours is the data underneath: about 4,300 metros, their teams and their rankings.