SECrillion

The Student Engineers' Council daily dive: 7 prompts, 25 seconds each, and rarer answers sink deeper. Inspired by Krillion.

The front end is plain HTML, CSS and JS with no build step. Vercel serverless functions in /api pool answers and scores in Neon Postgres.

Deploy (Vercel + Neon)

1. Import the repo into Vercel. No framework preset or build command is needed.
2. In the project's Storage tab, add a Neon Postgres database. That sets DATABASE_URL for you.
3. Deploy. The API creates its tables (db/schema.sql) on the first request, so a fresh Neon database needs no manual setup. To create them ahead of time instead:

   npm install
   vercel env pull .env.local
   npm run migrate
   

Run locally

• npm run dev (vercel dev) gives you the full game with the live database.
• python3 -m http.server 8000 serves only the front end. With no /api, the game falls back to seed counts and shows no ranking.

Files

Path	What it is
js/config.js	Name, launch date (Dive #1), timer, backend
data/questions.json	Every prompt, the daily schedule and the themed packs
tools/check-questions.mjs	Linter for the question file: node tools/check-questions.mjs
api/	Vercel functions: counts, answer, score, scores
db/schema.sql	Neon tables (answer_counts, scores)
js/scoring.js	Matching, points and tier bands

Writing questions

Each prompt is a list of accepted answers, and each answer has a seed count:

"campus-buildings": {
  "prompt": "Name a building on the Texas A&M campus in College Station",
  "answers": [
    "Zachry | Zachry Engineering Education Complex | ZACH = 30",
    "Evans Library | Evans = 20",
    "Cushing Library | Cushing = 3",
    "Francis Hall = 0"
  ]
}

• Canonical | alias | alias = seed. The first name is the one players see. Aliases are other spellings that also count.
• Scoring follows Krillion: every answer sits in a fixed tier worth fixed points: Plankton 10 · Schooler 30 · Rare 60 · Deep cut 85 · One in a SECrillion 100. Live player tallies never change an answer's points; they only order the "Most common" list.
• Prompts still written with a seed number get a tier from how common the seed is compared with the top answer: the top answer is Plankton, and a seed of 0 is One in a SECrillion.
• If what a player types isn't on the list, they're told and can try again until the timer runs out. So the list is the rules. Be generous: list every valid answer you can think of, and mark the obscure ones = 0.
• Matching ignores case, accents, punctuation, a leading "the" and trailing plurals. Any name or alias counts, so SHPE and Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers are the same answer.
• A near miss isn't scored right away. Like Krillion's answer corrections, the game puts the closest answer in the box ("Did you mean Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers?") and the player presses Enter to dive with it or keeps typing. Near misses are typos and swapped letters (SPHE), word-form slips ("Engineering" for "Engineers"), a missing word ("Society of Hispanic Engineers") and the start of exactly one answer's name ("Ellicott Dredge"). An alias that's only a letter or two off a different answer can trigger a surprising suggestion, so keep aliases distinct.
• Instead of a number, an answer can name its depth level: Tristan Forks = plankton. The levels are plankton, schooler, rare, deep cut and secrillion (One in a SECrillion). They score 10, 30, 60, 85 and 100 points.
• Plain objects work too: { "a": "Zachry", "aka": ["ZACH"], "n": 30 }.
• For prompts whose answers are whole sentences, add "loose": true (see sec-quotes). Matching then compares key words instead of the exact wording, ignoring filler like "I", "the" and "just". A guess that covers about three quarters of an answer's key words counts right away ("medium rare chicken" scores We should make a medium rare chicken). A partial one, or one that hits two distinctive words ("shave my head"), gets the "Did you mean…?" suggestion with the real quote filled in.

Scheduling

• pool lists the SEC / Aggie-engineering prompts, plus a few general engineering ones (programming languages, NASA, physics laws, …) that keep the rotation long enough. Daily dives and Unlimited only draw from it. The other general prompts (elements, polygons, …) are only reachable through their themed packs.

• poolFrom maps a pool prompt to the first dive number allowed to use it ("nasa": 11). Adding a prompt to the pool reshuffles the random draw for every dive that can use it, so give any new pool prompt a poolFrom of tomorrow's dive number to keep today's and earlier dives exactly as they were played.

• daily[0] is Dive #1, daily[1] is Dive #2, and so on, counted from launchDate. Once the schedule runs out, each day gets a random set of prompts from the pool, seeded by the dive number so everyone gets the same ones. A prompt asked in a daily dive can't come back for the next 5 days (repeatGapDays in js/config.js), and neither can anything it's kept apart from. That needs at least 7 × 6 = 42 slots in the pool, counting each apart group once. node tools/check-questions.mjs checks the pool size and simulates the next 400 dives, and fails if any prompt repeats inside the gap. The rule starts at dive repeatGapFromDive (11); earlier dives keep the 3-day rule they were played under so archives and saved logs stay valid. Scheduled dives are used as written, and Unlimited and themed packs stay random.

• packs show up under Themed Packs. Each play draws 7 of the pack's prompts.

• Run node tools/check-questions.mjs after editing. It flags duplicate aliases and unknown prompt ids.

How live rarity works

• When a player gives an accepted answer, /api/answer adds one to that prompt's tally in answer_counts. The server checks the answer against its own copy of questions.json, so junk can't get in, and what players type is never stored.
• At the start of a dive, /api/counts returns those tallies. They're added to your seed counts, so rarity makes sense from day one and then follows real play.
• /api/score and /api/scores drive the "better than X%" curve, which appears only once 5 real scores exist (no estimates).
• There's no rate limiting, so a determined player could inflate tallies. If that ever matters, add Vercel's firewall rate limits to /api/*.

The ESO prompt

eso lists 109 engineering student organizations, taken from each department's student-orgs page on engineering.tamu.edu. The seed counts rank them by size:

Seed	Size tier	Examples
25–30	Flagship	SEC, SWE, SHPE, IEEE, ASME, SPE
10–15	Large	PAID, AIChE, AIAA, ASCE, NSBE, BMES, Tau Beta Pi, EWB, SAE, TAMUhack
2–5	Mid-size	IISE, SEDS, Robomaster, Concrete Canoe, Steel Bridge, honor societies
1	Small	rocketry teams, ID/ET societies, smaller honor societies
0	Niche	graduate associations, advisory councils, small technical chapters

No org publishes a member count. The tiers are estimates anchored on these data points: SPE (1,300+ members in 2015), SHPE (National Large Chapter of the Year in 2019 and 2021), SWE (300+ active members) and PAID (called one of A&M's largest orgs). SEC officers should adjust them, and once the database is live, real answers take over.

The Slack prompts

Seven prompts come from the SEC Slack, pulled on Oct 23, 2026. They're in the daily pool and the Slack Lore pack.

Prompt	Source	How levels are set
sec-quotes	199 posts in #quotes from Oct 23, 2025 to Oct 22, 2026	Reactions plus half the reply count: the top 12% are plankton, the next 20% schooler, the next third rare, the rest deep cut. Two unreacted quotes are the gems. Only the quote counts, not who said it.
sec-slack-channels	All 97 public, non-archived channels in the workspace, including ones no one has joined (95 answers; the three fantasy football channels share one)	55% member count on a log scale (119 people are in the default channels) and 45% how obscure the name is. The two gems are #mazdacx-5, the Mazda CX-5 car channel, and #philanthropy-sr, which has no members. The 2023 summer channels are deep cuts because their 2025 and 2026 siblings make them easy to guess.
sec-quoted	Everyone quoted in that #quotes window	Quoted 8+ times plankton, 4–7 schooler, 2–3 rare, once deep cut. Dr. Hogan and Dr. Taele are the gems.
sec-emojis	157 custom emojis in the workspace (the 74 alphabet-letter emojis count as one answer)	How often each shows up as a reaction in #quotes this past year, then how guessable the name is. :party_blob:, :sai-clops: and :hungrykevin: are plankton; :etwithet: and :vpdvpivpo: are the gems.
sec-quotes-characters	Celebrities and characters named in those quotes	By how often they came up, then how guessable.

Two more come from the reminder channels (#weekly_reminders and the weekly recaps in #meeting_reminder), covering Aug 2025 to Oct 2026:

Prompt	Source	How levels are set
sec-lunch-and-learns	33 companies that hosted a Lunch & Learn or Dine & Discuss	Name recognition plus how often they came back. TI, Amazon, Boeing, Tesla, Google and Lockheed are plankton; Worley and Venture Global are the gems.
sec-events-2526	67 internal and external events, socials and volunteer shifts	Flagship events (Career Fair, EnVision, AMR) and Sonic Run are plankton; one-off socials like Pumpkin Painting and Friendsgiving are deep cuts. It's kept apart from sec-events so the two never share a dive.

To refresh them for a new year, re-pull #quotes, the channel list and the reminder channels, and regenerate these prompts.

The career fair prompts

career-fair-s26 and career-fair-f26 ask players to name a company at the Spring 2026 and Fall 2026 SEC Career Fairs. Both come from the confirmed-registration list (Companies_at_S26_or_F26.csv: 270 Spring companies, 512 Fall; "SEC Test Employer" is left out). Seeds rank name recognition among engineering students: 20–30 for household names (TI, Boeing, ExxonMobil), 10–18 for big engineering employers, 3–8 for companies known in their industry, and 1–2 for niche ones.

Each prompt has exactly one seed-0 company, the "one in a SECrillion" worth the full 100: Sazerac (Spring) and Ellicott Dredge Enterprises (Fall). Keep it to one per prompt; node tools/check-questions.mjs shows the unseen count.

To merge a new roster into a prompt, put one company per line in a text file and run node tools/import-fair.mjs roster.txt --prompt career-fair-f26. Companies already in the prompt keep their ranking. New ones are seeded by name recognition (or 1 if unknown) and listed so you can adjust them. While a fair is still upcoming on HireAggies, you can import it directly by its nickname, e.g. node tools/import-fair.mjs sec_f26_cdf.