Spitball
A daily guessing game. Solve the picture rebus to unlock the day's theme, then answer five questions with a number. The closer the guess, the higher the score.
Files
index.html is the whole game: layout, styling, scoring and the share popup.puzzles.js holds the puzzles, one per day, keyed by date (YYYY-MM-DD).
The puzzle changes for everyone at 12:01 AM Eastern time. If a day has no puzzle, the most recent earlier one is shown.
Adding a day's puzzle
Add an entry to puzzles.js under the new date. Each entry has:
rebus: tiles (pictures only), alt (a description for screen readers), answers (accepted answers in lowercase with no spaces), display (the answer as shown) and hint.theme: the day's broad topic.hype and oof: three themed reaction lines each, for great and terrible guesses.snippet: the "on this day" story. It must not give away any answer.questions: five, from easy to hard. Each has q, a, level, type ("ratio" for numbers, "year" for years), unit and fact, plus an optional spread.
Writing rules
- The hook is a real event from that date. The theme is one level broader (a film becomes the movies).
- At most one or two questions about the event itself. The rest should be things anyone can reason toward.
- Every answer is a number. State the unit.
- Numbers score by plain distance from the answer. The
level sets the range, which is how far off (as a percent of the answer) earns 50 points: Easy 40, Easy-medium 47, Medium 55, Medium-hard 63, Hard 70.
- Only add
spread to a question that should break from its level's range.
- For years,
spread is a percent of how long ago the event was (35 is standard).
- End every
fact with one emoji that fits it, after the final period.
- Check every fact against a source before publishing.
Scoring
Each question gives 0 to 100 for closeness. Questions 1 and 2 count once, question 3 counts double, and questions 4 and 5 count triple, for a maximum of 1,000.
