Rarest: Guess the Rarest Answer Nobody Else Thinks Of

Rarest is a free daily trivia game with a twist: every prompt has dozens or hundreds of right answers, and the less well known yours is, the more it scores. Name a country in Africa: Nigeria barely lifts your hot-air balloon off the runway, while Lesotho fires the burner up to Roar, twelve times the points. Seven prompts a day, the same for everyone, then share your flight without giving the answers away.

How to play

1. Take off. The daily round has 7 prompts, the same for every player. A new round starts at midnight where you live.
2. Name something that fits. Each prompt starts with "Name a…" or "Name the…", such as "Name a country in Africa", "Name a song by Queen" or "Name a breed of dog". Type any correct answer and press Enter. You have 25 seconds per prompt.
3. Keep guessing. A wrong guess costs one second: the box shakes and you can try again before time runs out (with No timer, nothing is lost). Small typos, missing accents and plurals are accepted.
4. Climb. Every correct answer lands in one of six tiers, from Flicker to Inferno: the rarer the answer, the harder the burner fires and the higher your balloon climbs. After each prompt you see where your answer ranks among all the accepted ones, with the best known and a few of the rarest. Each answer also paints one of the seven panels of your balloon in its tier colour. Once per round you can ride a thermal: tap Thermal ×2 before you answer and that prompt scores double, so save it for a prompt you know well.
5. Share your flight. The flight log leads with the altitude you reached and draws your flight path. Share it as a spoiler-free row of coloured squares or as a postcard of your painted balloon.

Scoring tiers

A prompt you pass or run out of time on scores 0. A perfect round of seven Inferno answers reaches 700 points and the orbit of the Space Station.

Where the answers come from

Every answer list in Rarest is built from Wikidata, the free knowledge base behind Wikipedia: if something belongs to the category and has an English Wikipedia article, it counts (in the very biggest categories, such as cheeses or dinosaurs, the best-known few hundred do). That keeps the lists complete, from all 54 countries of Africa and all 45 US presidents to more than 600 breeds of dog.

Rarity comes from public Wikipedia statistics: how many other articles link to an answer, how often people read about it, and in how many languages it has an article. Answers everybody knows land in the low tiers, and the ones only a specialist would think of fire the burner to Inferno. No list or tier is written by hand, and an answer is only ever ranked against the other answers to the same prompt. Read more on the About page.

Ways to play

• Daily: one round a day, numbered, the same for everyone. Reloading the page picks up where you left off, and finishing the daily keeps your day streak going.
• Unlimited: as many rounds as you like, with fresh prompts every time.
• Categories: play only geography, animals, food and drink, sports, movies and TV, music, science or history.
• No timer: switch it on to take as long as you want. Shared results say when a round was played without the clock.

If you came here from Krillion, which made rare-answer trivia popular, see our guide to games like Krillion for how the two compare and what else to play.

643 prompts in eight categories

Rarest has 643 prompts with about 102,000 accepted answers:

• Geography: countries and capitals by continent, US states, rivers, volcanoes, deserts, Greek islands
• Animals: breeds of dog, cat and horse, sharks, owls, snakes, penguins, marsupials
• Food & Drink: cheeses, pasta shapes, cocktails, Italian, Japanese and Mexican dishes, apple varieties
• Sports: NBA, NFL, MLB and NHL teams, Premier League clubs, Formula One champions, Grand Slam winners
• Movies & TV: Pixar and Disney films, Best Picture winners, sitcoms, Simpsons and Star Wars characters
• Music: songs by the Beatles, Queen, ABBA and Taylor Swift, operas, instruments, boy bands
• Science: chemical elements, constellations, moons, dinosaurs, bones, programming languages
• History: US presidents, British monarchs, Roman emperors, popes, Greek gods, famous battles

Each category has its own page with a game locked to it, and the rarest answers to all 643 prompts are on the rarest answers page.

Tips for finding the rarest answer

• Skip your first thought. If an answer came to you instantly, it probably came to everyone else too.
• Think in regions and eras. For a prompt about composers, go past the famous Viennese names to Baroque Italy or Czech romantics.
• Use what you know best. Your hobbies are worth points: a birder knows the Philippine falconet, a film buff knows the whole Ghibli catalogue.
• Bank a safe answer when time is short. A common answer still beats no answer.
• No repeats in a round. An answer you already used is refused, so save your favourites.
• Learn from the reveal. The rare answers shown after each prompt are tomorrow's points.

Share your flight

When you land, the share button gives you a short result like this, with one square per prompt coloured by tier:

Rarest #12
🟫🟧🟪🟥⬜🟨⬛
🎈 43.2 km · 230 pts
https://rarest.me

It never shows your answers, so friends can play the same daily round without spoilers.