How to play Rara, the daily rare answer game

How a dive works

Each day’s game is a dive of seven prompts, such as “Name a place children hide in hide-and-seek”. Everyone playing in the same language gets the same seven prompts that day.

You have 30 seconds for each prompt. On your first prompt, the clock starts when you begin typing.

Type an answer and press Go. Your first accepted answer counts, and you move on.

If an answer does not fit the prompt, it is a wrong guess: try another. You have 5 wrong guesses per prompt. Sometimes an answer cannot be checked straight away; you then see “We don’t know that one” and it does not use up a guess.

If time runs out or you use all 5, the prompt scores nothing, and we show a rare answer you could have said, with a short fact about it.

A new dive starts every day at 00:00 UTC (7:00 in Vietnam).

How rarity is scored

Every accepted answer gets a rarity score from 10 to 99, in one of five tiers: Common (10–39), Uncommon (40–69), Rare (70–89), Epic (90–96) and Legendary (97–99).

The tier comes from our estimate of how commonly people give that answer. Within the tier, today’s players set the exact number: the fewer of them said your answer, the higher it goes.

Each answer also takes you deeper into the ocean: about 60 m for a 10, up to about 1,570 m for a 99, and your dive’s result is your total depth. On the way down you pass five zones: Sunlit, Twilight (from 200 m), Midnight (1,000 m), Abyss (4,000 m) and Trench (6,000 m), down to the ocean floor at 10,994 m.

Early in the day, the exact number leans on our own estimate; as more people play, it follows what players actually said, within the answer’s tier. A score never changes once you have it.

At the end, once enough players have finished that day and you went deeper than at least half of them, you see “Better than 70% of players today”: roughly the share of today’s dives in your language that went less deep than yours.

What counts as an answer

An answer must be something real, and it must fit the prompt.

Spelling does not need to be perfect: capital letters, spaces, punctuation, a first “a” or “the”, a missing accent and a one-letter slip in a longer word are all fine.

Answers that are not on our list are checked too, so an unusual but correct answer can count.

If a prompt ended without a score, the end screen may show the last answer we could not confirm, with a “This should count” button. Press it and we will review it.

Frequently asked questions

What is a rare answer game?

A game where you want a correct answer that few other people think of. The more common an answer, the less it scores.

Is Rara free?

Yes. Rara is free and plays in your web browser, on a phone or a computer. There is no account to create and no app to install.

When is there a new game?

Every day at 00:00 UTC (7:00 in Vietnam). There is one dive a day, the same for everyone playing in your language.

Which languages can I play in?

English and Vietnamese. Choose it under How to play in the game before you start the day’s dive; once you have started, the dive stays in that language until the next day. Each language has its own daily dive and is scored among its own players.

Is Rara like other rare answer games?

Rara belongs to the same family of rare-answer games as the daily game Krillion and the TV quiz Pointless, where the best answer is a correct one that few people give. Rara is an independent game with its own prompts and scoring, and it is not affiliated with either.

How do I get a higher score?

Think of real answers that most people would not say first: the one that comes to mind first is often everyone else’s too. Just make sure it fits the prompt, since a wrong guess scores nothing.