How to play

The board

Every day you get a three-by-three grid. Three criteria run down the left, three across the top, and each of the nine cells is the crossing of one of each. A cell wants a champion who satisfies both of its lines: the row's and the column's.

The criteria are traits the whole roster carries: region, class, position, resource, release, and so on. If you want to see exactly what the puzzle knows about a champion before you commit to them, the champion roster lists every trait a criterion can be written against.

A champion can only be used once per board. Nine cells means nine different champions, which is what stops a grid being solved by naming the same flexible pick nine times.

A turn

1. Choose a cell. Click it, or let the board choose the next open one for you; it walks forward on its own as you fill.
2. Name a champion. Type into the box and pick from the list. Nothing is judged yet: the champion is a draft, sitting in the cell dimmed, and it costs you nothing. Click a drafted cell twice to take the pick back.
3. Lock in. The button opens only when all nine cells hold a champion. Locking submits the whole board at once and the server judges it in one go.

Every cell you got right is filled and stays filled. Every cell you got wrong opens back up, and the lock is spent. You get three locks. Fail all three and the round is over; the board then shows you every champion who would have fit each cell, which is usually the most interesting part of a bad day.

The whole board is one attempt on purpose. It means a nine-cell grid is not nine independent guesses to brute-force one at a time: you have to commit to a reading of all nine at once, and a single wrong cell costs you a lock.

Game points and ranks

Everything you earn is GP, game points. It is lifetime and it only ever goes up; there is no demotion here, and no season reset. Your rank is simply the highest rung your GP total has reached.

What a solve pays

A day you turn up for and lose still pays: showing up counts, and a streak you can only keep by winning is a streak that punishes you for a hard board.

What a Simulator run pays

A finished daily run in the Worlds Simulator pays by how far your team got, once a day. It carries no streak bonus.

The streak bonus

Finishing a grid extends your daily streak, and with an account the streak pays a bonus equal to its length, capped at 30 GP a day. It rewards turning up every day without letting a long run outrun the tier table.

Rarity: the part that matters

Most cells have more than one right answer. Some have thirty. If a criterion crossing is broad enough that anyone can fill it, filling it is not much of an achievement, so the board is also scored on how many other people made the same picks you did.

When a round ends, every filled cell shows the share of players who filled it with your champion. Average those nine shares and you have your board's pick rate. Lower is rarer, and rarer pays:

The rarity bonus is paid overnight, not at the moment you solve. It cannot be judged while the day is still open; the first player to solve a board has, by definition, made the same picks as everyone else who has solved it, which is nobody. So the day closes, the crowd's picks are counted, and the bonus lands on your account's total before the next board is drawn. A score that moves overnight is this, and it is not a bug. Every player's picks count in the crowd, but only an account is paid the bonus.

This is the whole reason to think twice about an obvious cell. Ionia × Mage is a dozen champions and everybody names the same two.

The ladder

Lifetime GP decides your rank, and the ladder is a pro career: you start as a Rookie and climb through the academy and onto a starting roster, then to the apex, where Finalist, Champion and Demon King have no divisions. Below the apex each rank has four, numbered 1 to 4 as you climb. A daily player makes Starter in about a month and reaches Demon King in something over a year, which is roughly the pacing a ranked ladder should have.

The number under each crest is the lifetime GP that seats it. A gate can be lowered and a rank can be added, but a gate is never raised: nobody is ever demoted by a change to these ten. Where you stand against everyone else is on the leaderboard.

Odds and ends

• A new grid is drawn every day at midnight, Sydney time. The countdown at the foot of the board is the real clock.
• You do not need an account to play. Without one your record lives in this browser only, and only signed in players are on the ladder or have their progress saved. Making an account puts you on it under your own name and keeps your record on any device; the round you played today comes with it, and earlier rounds stay in the browser.
• A round is the server's, not the browser's. Start on a phone, finish on a laptop: the board opens exactly as you left it, and refreshing gives you nothing back.
• Sharing a result never leaks the answers. The message is nine squares and a score: which cells you filled, never who filled them.