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.