Krillion Infinite: the daily word game where the obvious answer loses

Krillion Infinite is a free daily word game you play in a browser. Every day it gives you seven prompts — name a cheese, name an actor, name a spice — and everyone in the world gets the same seven. The catch is the scoring, which runs backwards from every quiz you have played: the answer that arrives first is worth almost nothing, and the further your answer sits from what everybody else typed, the deeper you sink.

A dive takes about four minutes. There is no account, no app, no payment and no advertising. Scroll back up to play Krillion — today's set is live, and it changes at 00:00 UTC.

What Krillion actually asks you

Most word games reward you for knowing an answer. Krillion assumes you know one and asks a harder question: is it yours, or is it the answer a thousand other people typed into the same box this morning? A prompt reads name a cheese. Cheddar is correct and pays 10 points. Taleggio is correct and pays 85. Both take three seconds to type. That gap is the entire design of the game.

This is why a first dive so often reads like a failing grade. Seven correct answers can land you at 70 points out of a possible 700, and nothing was wrong with any of them — they were simply the answers everyone gives. Fixing that is one habit rather than more knowledge, and it is what the strategy page is for.

How to play Krillion

1. Press BEGIN DIVE. The first prompt appears and a 25-second clock starts immediately.
2. Type an answer and submit it. A hit ends the round and sinks you by whatever it was worth.
3. A miss costs you a slice of the clock, not the round, so guessing is correct play.
4. Seven rounds later you get a depth in metres, a band, and an emoji strip you can share.

Answers are matched loosely and on purpose. A missing accent, a doubled letter, a stray plural, British spelling against American — all of it still lands. You are being scored on what you thought of, not on whether you can spell it under a clock. The full rules are on how to play.

What each tier pays

Every answer in a prompt's bank is filed by how widely known it is, and that filing is what pays you. There are six tiers, and one point buys four metres of descent.

Only three or four answers per prompt sit in Plankton — the handful a room full of people would shout in unison. Step off those and you are paid properly straight away. Close to four fifths of every bank is worth the full 85, because the hard part is not being obscure, it is thinking of anything at all inside 25 seconds. Scoring has the shares each tier is cut at and the band thresholds.

Depth, not a mark out of 700

A Krillion dive is reported in metres rather than as a score, because metres are the thing you feel. Seven perfect answers would be 700 points and 2,800 m of water, which is the trench floor, and nobody reaches it. The five bands you pass on the way down — Shallows, Schooler, Thermocline, Deep Cut, Trench — are pinned to real places in the water column rather than to round numbers.

Why it is called Krillion Infinite

The infinite part is the guessing. Inside a round there is no cap on attempts: a word you are only half sure is a real cheese is worth typing, because the downside is a second or two of clock and the upside is 85 points. You can also concede a round, but not for the first 15 seconds — an instant concede would be a skip button, and a skip button turns a dive into a quiz you rush through.

What is not infinite is the number of daily dives. There is one set of seven prompts per day, shared by every player, and it resets at midnight UTC. That is what makes a score worth comparing: you and everyone you send it to answered the same seven questions.

Endless mode: when one dive a day is not enough

If you finish the daily and want to keep going, endless mode is the other half of the game. It drops the seven-round structure and the per-round clock and replaces both with a single tank of air: 40 seconds, draining only while you are answering, topped back up by every answer you land. A gem buys 14 seconds, a deep cut 8, the answer everyone gives buys 1. Prompts come at random from the whole bank and the run ends when the air does.

It asks for a different skill. The daily rewards the rarest answer you can find in 25 seconds; endless rewards a rare answer found fast, because thinking is the thing that spends the air. There is no daily limit and no floor to hit — start a run.

Where the answers come from

Every prompt carries a hand-checked bank of accepted answers, sorted by how widely known each one is. The pack holds 140 prompts and more than 21,000 accepted answers across them, averaging around 156 per prompt, and the deepest bank runs to 267. If a good answer is rejected, or a common one is paying like a rare one, the rejection is logged so the bank can be repaired — and you can say so directly.

Questions people ask

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