How scoring works

What each rung is worth

On a five-rung ladder: 1000, 620, 380, 240, 150. On a four-rung ladder the first four of those. On the two three-rung games — Guess the Celebrity and Guess the Recipe — 1000, 620, 380 and nothing after that.

The curve has a floor of 80 points, so that a last-gasp correct answer is never worth nothing at all. No ladder here is long enough to reach it: the deepest rung in use pays 150, a sixth would pay 90, and it would take a seventh before the floor did any work.

Losing a rung to a wrong guess costs exactly the same as buying one. Two wrong guesses on a five-rung ladder puts a round that opened at 1000 down to 380.

The speed bonus

Eight points per second of the twenty you did not use, so an instant answer is worth 160 and an answer after twenty seconds is worth nothing extra. It is added to the rung value before the multiplier is applied, so a fast answer on a live streak is worth more than a fast answer at the start of a run.

The clock runs from the start of the round and is not reset by buying a rung. In practice the bonus is small enough that it should never make you guess: 160 points is less than the 380 you give up by dropping one rung on a fresh round.

The streak multiplier

One tenth per consecutive correct round, capped at ten: your first correct answer is worth 1.0x, the second 1.1x, and from the eleventh onwards 2.0x. Any lost round resets it to zero.

This is the largest single lever in the game. Across a ten-round run the multipliers sum to 14.5 if you win every round, which means the difference between winning nine rounds and winning all ten is much larger than one round's points.

In the release-year game a near-miss still counts as a win for streak purposes, even when the accuracy fraction has cut the points to 15 per cent.

Partial credit in the year game

Guess the Year is the only game with an accuracy fraction. Exact is 1.0, one year off is 0.6, two years 0.35, three years 0.15, and four or more is a miss — which costs a rung like any other wrong answer.

The fraction multiplies the rung value and the speed bonus together, and the streak multiplier is applied after it. So a one-year miss at the top of the ladder with no bonus is 600 points, which is almost exactly what an exact answer one rung down would have paid.

What a good run looks like

The theoretical maximum for a ten-round game is 16,820: every round answered instantly on the first rung, with the streak multiplier climbing all the way. For the two eight-round games — Guess the Movie and Guess the Country — it is 12,528.

Nobody scores that. In practice, a run over 6,000 means you were mostly winning on the first two rungs, and a run over 10,000 means you were winning on the first rung and doing it quickly. Anything under 3,000 usually means a streak broke early and never recovered, which is worth more attention than any individual round.

Scores post to that game's leaderboard when the run ends, along with rounds won and best streak, which are shown next to the score because they say something the total does not.