How the OUTLIER Leaderboards Work, and Why We Built Them This Way

Five boards, five different questions

Most games have one leaderboard and force it to mean everything at once. OUTLIER has five, because 'who is the best' is more than one question. Every leaderboard page shares the same tab bar: Today, This Season, Hall of Fame, Most Consistent, and Your Orbit.

Today is the live daily board: every player who solved today's grid, ranked by their rarity score, refreshed as the day runs. It's the fastest feedback loop in the game and the one most people check first. You can flip back through every past day from here too.

This Season is the monthly race, and it's where the real competition lives. Hall of Fame is the permanent record of the all-time greats. Most Consistent rewards the players who beat the field day after day. Those four rank you against everyone who played. Your Orbit is the odd one out: it ranks only the players you follow, on its own page. The rest of this guide is what each of those means and why they exist.

This Season: a fresh race every month

A Season is one calendar month. On the first, everything resets and everyone is level again. Your season score is the average of your best twelve days that month, so a couple of missed days never sink you and a newcomer who joins mid-month can still stack twelve great boards and win.

We made Seasons the heart of the competition on purpose. A single all-time list slowly rots: the players at the top from months ago freeze there, and everyone still showing up sees an unreachable ceiling and stops trying. A monthly reset fixes that. Every player, every country, and every newcomer gets a fresh shot at number one, on a clock, every single month. It's the same reason a casino deals a new hand: the past never locks you out, and there's always another round coming.

Each season has its own permanent page, so June and every month after live at their own address forever, and you can browse them all from the seasons index.

The podium: Champion, Runner-Up, Third

Every finished season crowns a full podium. First place is the Champion, second is the Runner-Up, third is Third Place, and those three are recorded permanently. While a season is still live the top of the board reads Leader, Runner-Up and Third, so you always know exactly where the medals stand with days left to fight for them.

Win a place and it follows you home: a Champion crown, a silver Runner-Up badge, or a bronze Third badge appears right in your profile hero, linking back to the season you earned it in. Those badges never expire. They're the permanent proof that on a given month, in a game played by the whole planet, you finished on top.

There's a bigger prize above the monthly one. Across the whole year the same math runs on your best thirty days to crown the Player of the Year, decided on December 31. Monthly medals are the sprint. Player of the Year is the marathon.

Hall of Fame vs Most Consistent: peak skill vs steady nerve

Two all-time boards, because two very different things are worth celebrating. The Hall of Fame ranks players by peak skill: a blend of your best ten and best three days ever. It answers the only question that matters for 'best player' in a game with a ceiling of 1000, which is how high can you reach. This is where the monsters live.

Most Consistent rewards the opposite virtue: finishing near the top of the field, day after day, over a long record. It's a loyalty-and-consistency board, and it's a real achievement, just a different one. A player who almost never has a bad day belongs here proudly, even if they never post a single sky-high game.

Splitting them is deliberate. Forcing one number to mean both 'most skilled' and 'most dedicated' is how you end up with a leaderboard nobody trusts. Now the peaks live in the Hall of Fame, the metronomes own Most Consistent, and neither one has to pretend to be the other.

Why rarity, not volume, and why peaks matter

All of this rests on one scoring rule: your day is scored on the rarity of the words you find, not how many or how long they are. A seven-letter word the whole world finds is nearly worthless. A short, strange word almost nobody reaches can win the board. Ranking follows the same logic, which is why the flagship all-time board rewards your best days rather than your average one.

In a game where elite players cluster near a hard ceiling, the information that separates them lives in their peaks, in the rare-word days, not in the middle of their distribution. A player whose best days average 940 with the occasional off day is a demonstrably sharper word-finder than a steady 888, and the Hall of Fame is built to say so. It's the same instinct behind every good OUTLIER habit: reach past the easy answer. See how to win for how to turn that into rank.

Your Orbit: the board of people you follow

The four boards above rank you against everyone. Orbit ranks you against the players you follow. Follow someone from their profile or from Orbit search and they appear on your board, ranked against you on the same daily Set. It's one tap. There's no request and no approval, and if they follow you back a mutual mark appears next to their name. Once you have played, a Your Orbit tab sits at the end of the tab bar on every leaderboard page, and it opens on whichever day you were already looking at.

Orbit has three views. Daily ranks your Orbit on a single day's Set, and you can step back through past days or jump straight to one. Players who haven't played that day yet are listed below the ranking rather than inside it. This Week and All Time rank by average score, so playing four boards well beats playing seven badly. Scores are visible before you play, on purpose: a score never reveals a word, so seeing a friend on 780 gives you a number to beat and nothing else. Words stay hidden until a board is behind you, the same rule as everywhere else on the site.

It exists because a global rank is a blunt instrument on its own. Finishing 4,000th out of tens of thousands is hard to read as good or bad. Finishing fourth out of the nine people you know isn't. The scoring is identical to every other board and only the field changes. If someone in your Orbit hasn't played today you can nudge them once, and the invite link prompts a new player to follow you back after their first Set. You can also switch the whole thing off: turning Let other players follow you to Off in Settings takes you off everyone's board and clears your followers, and a private profile does the same. The Orbit answers in the FAQ cover the rest.

How to get on the board, and start climbing

Play, claim a handle, and you appear automatically. A handful of games gets you a rank; the all-time boards ask for a slightly longer record so a lucky day or two can't fake a career. Every board lists every eligible player, so you can scroll all the way down and find yourself, wherever you are today.

The fastest way up is the one the whole game rewards: stop grabbing the obvious words, hunt the rare ones your rivals walked past, and come back tomorrow. Seasons reward showing up, the Hall of Fame rewards your best swings, and your profile keeps the crowns you win along the way. New month, clean slate, everyone back to zero, and the same grid waiting for whoever sees deepest.

Pick a board and go: chase today, race this season, aim for the Hall of Fame, or build your Orbit and race the people you already know. The whole planet is on the same letters as you right now.