A daily word game played with athletes instead of words. Sixteen names sit on one board and every name belongs to exactly one of four hidden groups; your job is to work out what the four groups are. There is one board a day for each league, it is the same board for everybody who opens it, and a full board takes most people a few minutes.
Pick four names you think share something, submit them, and the board tells you whether the set is right. Solve all four groups before you run out of mistakes and the board is done. The groups are never about who was better — they are facts from the record, like the club a player turned out for or the number on their back.
Four. A wrong set costs one and the board tells you nothing about which names were close, because a near-miss hint would collapse the hardest group into a process of elimination. Spend all four and the board opens itself and shows the answer, so a losing day still ends with the four groups explained rather than with a locked screen.
No, and the ladder is the point. One group is built to be spotted almost immediately, two sit in the middle, and the fourth is written to be invisible until the others are gone. Colour tracks that order once a group is solved. The trap is the name that plausibly fits two groups at once, which is placed on purpose and is usually what costs the first mistake.
Everyone, everywhere, and in the same tile positions. The day picks the board and the board picks the shuffle, with nothing read from a clock or a random number, so a result is worth comparing and a shared grid means the same thing to the person who opens it. Tomorrow’s board cannot be reached early by editing the address.
Midnight Eastern, the same rollover the rest of the site runs on, so a fresh board lands at the same instant for a reader in Tokyo and a reader in Los Angeles rather than whenever their own midnight happens to fall. Each league turns over together, and each new board carries the next number in that league’s own run.
Ten, each with a board of its own every day: the NFL, the NBA, MLB, the NHL, soccer, the WNBA, college football, college basketball, the AFL and cricket. They are separate games rather than one board wearing ten badges — a name, a fact family and a difficulty ladder drawn from that league’s own record. Playing one does not use up another.
Every day since a league opened stays playable and keeps its own number, so a day you missed is not a day lost, and there is no limit on how many old ones you work through in a sitting. Nothing carries between them: an older board is scored on its own and never rewrites a run you have already finished.
Free, and no. The board opens straight into the game, nothing is asked for before or after a result, and there is no cap on how many leagues you play in a day. Progress lives on your own device, so clearing your browser data clears it with them — that is the trade for never being asked to sign up.
Yes, and they arrive in a fixed order rather than all at once. The first names a group, and each one after that hands over a single member of it, so help is a ladder you can step off as soon as you see the idea. Hints never cost a mistake, and the count you took travels with your result so a shared grid stays honest.
Each league keeps its own run, counted in days you finished rather than days you opened, and your longest is kept beside the current one. Playing an older board never extends a run — only the day it belongs to can do that — and running out of mistakes ends the run but still counts as a day played.
A daily bounty of 500 Pennants, once for each league you clear, on the day it belongs to. Pennants are the house currency and they are earned only — nothing on this site sells them — so the wallet is a record of what you actually played rather than of what you spent.
Public record only — the teams a player appeared for, position, honours, era, college, birth country, draft, handedness, the number they wore and the name itself. Nothing is a rating, an opinion or a projection, because a group a fan cannot verify afterwards is a group that reads as unfair even when it is correct.
Tell us from the board itself — there is a control under it that reports the exact puzzle you are looking at, and it takes a reason and a note. Public facts are precisely the thing that turns out to be miscredited, and a board is written a year ahead, so a wrong one sits there until somebody says so.
The order you solved the groups in and the mistakes you made, as coloured squares and nothing else. No names travel with it, so posting a result cannot spoil the board for the person reading it.
