Krillion Rules | How Scoring and Rarity Actually Work
The rules look simple on the surface, seven prompts, 25 seconds each, one answer, but the scoring underneath is where most people get lost, so I figured I'd lay out exactly how rarity is determined straight from the developer's own FAQ, because honestly there's a lot of half wrong info floating around, and I've found the official FAQ is the only place that actually gets it right.
The basic rules
Seven prompts a day, and they're the same for every single player, so there's no luck of the draw to hide behind. And you get 25 seconds per prompt to type your answer and lock it in before the timer ends, no going back. But you only get one answer per prompt, no multiple guesses, so you have to choose carefully. And the rarer your correct answer is, the further down the dive you go, while an obvious answer barely moves you at all.
How rarity is scored
Rarity depends on the question, and Krillion scores in two different ways. Some prompts get scored mechanically against a familiarity database, which means the game checks how often a word or name turns up in what people read and write, and if your answer barely shows up anywhere it counts as rare. So the other kind of prompt gets a combination of LLM assistance and a manual pass from the developer, because those ones can't be reduced to a number like that.
What is the gem answer
A lot of players assume the daily gem, called the Krillion, is simply the rarest possible answer, but that's not quite right. The developer's reasoning is that past a certain depth rarity gets basically impossible to disambiguate, so the gem is also picked for fun factor, the answer that's most satisfying to land on, something at least a few of you get. So the Krillion is rare and fun, not just the most obscure word in the set, you get the idea.
Past a certain depth, rarity gets hard to disambiguate, so the gem is also picked for fun factor: the answer that's most satisfying to land on.
Why autocorrect is so generous
Players notice Krillion lets through answers that are a letter or two off, and that's on purpose. Some prompts have thousands of accepted answers, and a lot of those answers have aliases because people use different names for the same thing, and autocorrect checks the aliases too. The developer's own example is Threebanded Sheephead, which has sea donkey as an alias, and that's only one letter off sea monkey, even though sea monkey and Threebanded Sheephead look nothing alike. So a near miss can turn your guess into something you weren't expecting.
What "too clever" means
Krillion's FAQ defines too clever as the go to obscure pick that isn't actually that obscure. In other words, it's the answer everyone thinks is a deep cut, but because everyone reaches for it, it's not rare at all. And avoiding too clever answers is a big part of the strategy in the answers guide.
How answers are curated
Answer sets come from aggregating datasets, dictionaries, wiki pages, encyclopedias, whatever sources a question calls for, and stuff like that, then merging and cleaning the result into one answer set. Sometimes a fair answer is missing because a source was missed, which the developer says they try to keep as rare as possible.