How to Play Krillion

Updated September 30, 2026

The rules, in order

1. Seven prompts. Everyone playing that day gets the same seven, in the same order.
2. One answer per prompt. No second guesses, no list of options to pick from — it's free text.
3. About 20 seconds each. The clock is per prompt, and running out means no answer for that round.
4. One attempt a day. Your daily run is one run. You can't go back and replay a prompt.
5. Scored by rarity. Your answer is matched against the official set and stamped with a tier.
6. Score becomes depth. The seven tier values are added up, and each point is 10 metres of depth.

The full arithmetic — the six tier values and the 700-point ceiling — is on the scoring page. What follows here is what to do with the clock.

The three habits that decide your score

1. Scan before you commit

Use the first few seconds to map more than one valid answer instead of typing your first idea. Your first idea is the one most other players had too, which is exactly why it scores at the bottom. Naming three candidates before choosing one costs nothing and it's the single biggest difference between a Plankton run and a Schooler run.

2. Skip the headline answer

If an answer feels instantly obvious, assume a large share of players typed it. The reliable move isn't to reach for something obscure you half-remember — it's to go one specific step past obvious: a real, named thing that clearly fits instead of the category's mascot.

3. Stay inside the list

The most common way to score nothing is a perfectly reasonable answer the game doesn't accept. Reasonable and accepted are not the same thing, and a rejected answer scores 0 — not the 10 points Plankton pays. If you can't think of anything rare, the safe play is a boring valid answer, not a gamble.

What "the clock" actually costs you

Twenty seconds is enough for two quick decisions and not enough for a search through your memory. That means you should never use the clock to find an answer you don't already know — you use it to choose between answers you do know. The questions where players lose the most points aren't the hard ones; they're the easy ones where an obvious answer got typed in four seconds.

One helpful pattern from the archive: prompts with a small official answer pool are where rare answers sit closest to the surface, while prompts with thousands of accepted answers reward going narrow and specific. Every date in the archive lists the pool size for all seven prompts, so you can see the shape of a day before you play it.

What you get for a good run

Depth, mostly — and a shareable result. The scale runs from 70 points (seven Plankton answers, 700 m) to the perfect 700 points (7,000 m, the trench floor). There's no speed bonus anywhere in the scoring, so the extra seconds are only ever worth spending on choosing a rarer answer.

If you want to keep playing after your daily run, Krillion also has a themed pack mode and an Endless Dive with no daily limit — that's covered on the Unlimited page.

Krillion how-to-play FAQ

How do you play Krillion?

Seven prompts, one free-text answer each, about 20 seconds per prompt, one attempt a day. Answers are scored by rarity inside the official answer set rather than by correctness.

Do you need an account or payment to play?

No. It runs in the browser, and the daily dive is free. There's no signup step in front of the game.

Can you play Krillion more than once a day?

The standard Daily Dive is one attempt per day. For more, play the themed packs or the Endless Dive, which draw on their own pool of prompts.

What happens if you don't answer in time?

You lose that prompt. There's no penalty beyond the missing points, but a missed prompt is the most expensive thing that can happen in a run — it costs more than two tier upgrades can repay.

Where to go next