Krillion is a daily browser game at krillion.io where everyone on Earth gets the same seven open-ended prompts. You get 25 seconds per prompt to type one answer — and the fewer other players would give that answer, the more it scores. The whole thing is wrapped in an ocean dive: every point sinks you 10 metres, and a perfect 700-point day ends on the trench floor, 7,000 metres down.
The rules in one minute
- Open the official site — no account or app needed. Press Begin Descent.
- Each round shows one prompt for a 3-second preview, then the 25-second clock starts.
- Type one answer that fits the prompt and submit with Enter or Dive.
- If your answer isn't on the accepted list, it's refused but the clock keeps running — you can try another while time remains.
- After seven rounds you get a dive log: your total score, your depth, and how you compared with the day's other players. One dive per day — no retries.
How scoring works
Every accepted answer earns exactly one of six fixed tier scores. There is no partial credit:
| Tier | Points | Depth | | --- | --- | --- | | One in a Krillion | 100 | 1,000 m | | Deep Cut | 85 | 850 m | | Rare | 60 | 600 m | | Schooler | 30 | 300 m | | Too Clever | 15 | 150 m | | Plankton | 10 | 100 m |
A missed or unrecognized answer scores 0 — which is worse than Plankton, the lowest valid tier. Your seven tier scores are simply added up and multiplied by ten for depth. All Plankton answers make 70 points (700 m); seven perfect answers make 700 (7,000 m).
The ocean zones you pass are real: the sunlight zone ends at 200 m, twilight at 1,000 m, midnight at 4,000 m, the abyss at 6,000 m, and the hadal trenches — named for Hades — below that.
What the tiers actually mean
- Plankton is the answer everyone blurts out. On a typical prompt only a handful of accepted answers score this low — the obvious head of the list.
- Too Clever is the trap tier: the "obscure" answer that thousands of other players also thought was obscure. If a fact made you feel clever because you once heard it as trivia, it probably lives here.
- Schooler is a solid, sensible answer that swims with the school.
- Rare answers are genuinely uncommon — most players never reach for them.
- Deep Cut is where the bulk of a long answer list sits: specific, correct, and off most people's radar.
- One in a Krillion answers are hand-picked gems: not just the rarest entry, but one that's satisfying to land on. A prompt usually has one or two, and some short prompts have none.
The 25-second strategy
- Read the whole prompt during the 3-second preview. Conditions in brackets ("pure elements only", "within city limits") are where answers get refused.
- Skip your first answer. It's the one everyone else is typing. Name your first three ideas, set them aside, and give the next correct one.
- Go one level more specific: the species instead of the animal, the dish instead of the ingredient, the full name instead of the surname.
- Try the ambitious answer first and keep a safe one ready — refused answers cost nothing but seconds, while an empty prompt scores zero.
- Mind your spelling. Autocorrect is generous and many answers have aliases, but a mangled guess wastes the clock.
Where the name comes from
A krillion isn't a real number — it's a pun on the made-up "-illion" family (zillion, gazillion) with a krill inside, from the 2011 film Happy Feet Two, where Will the Krill leaves his swarm and declares "I am one in a krillion." Krill gather in swarms of up to 30,000 per cubic metre; to be one in a krillion is to be the single krill that did something different. That's exactly what the game pays for.
When does Krillion reset?
The Daily Dive rolls over at midnight US Eastern — 04:00 UTC during daylight saving time, 05:00 UTC otherwise. Miss a day and its prompts retire from the stage, but not from the record: our archive keeps every recorded day.