By Michael Szerencsy
Ten questions. Fifteen seconds each. A thousand points if you're perfect and fast. That's Outlier Trivia in one breath, and you can be playing it in the time it takes to read this sentence. But under that simple surface sits a surprisingly deep game: a daily set the whole world plays together, 499 numbered games you can tackle in any order, leaderboards for every day, every game and every topic, and a chess-style rating that can one day call you a Grand Master. This guide walks through all of it, start to finish.
The 30-second version
You get ten multiple-choice questions, one at a time. Each one gives you four answers and fifteen seconds. Pick the right one and you score between 80 and 100 points, more the faster you tap. Pick wrong, or let the clock run out, and you score nothing for that question. Ten perfect, lightning answers is 1,000.
There are two ways to play, and they're built for two different moods. Today's Ten is the Daily: one set for the whole world, one go, a new one every day. Quick 10 is whenever you like, as often as you like, across 499 numbered games. Neither touches your OUTLIER word game score, streak or rank. Trivia is its own thing, with its own records.
Today's Ten: the Daily
Today's Ten is the appointment. Every day at 12PM Eastern, the same moment the word game board drops, a fresh set of ten questions goes live, and everybody on earth gets exactly the same ten. You get one go. No retries, no practice run, no peeking.
Each Daily has a Day number. Day 1 was the first, Day 2 the next, and so on, so when a friend says they scored 870 on Day 12 you know precisely which ten they faced. The ten always cover ten different topics, so a Daily is a tour, not a deep dive.
Every Day has its own leaderboard, ranked by score with the faster player ahead on a tie. There's also an all-days board that ranks your average daily score once you've played three days, and a board for every topic. Today's Ten questions are written only for the Daily: they never show up in Quick 10, and Quick 10 questions never show up here.
Quick 10: 499 games, pick your own path
Quick 10 is the one you play on the train, in a queue, or at 1am because you can't sleep. There's no schedule. The whole question bank, 5,000 questions, is split once into 499 fixed games, Game 1 through Game 499, and no question appears in more than one of them.
That split matters. Everyone who plays Game 37 gets the same ten questions in the same order, whenever they play it. Which means every numbered Game is quietly a tournament, and every Game has its own leaderboard.
You can play each Game once. Only finished games count: leave halfway and nothing goes on your record, and that Game shows as unplayed again. Quick 10 games you played before numbering arrived are still on your record, labelled Classic, and they still count toward your average and topic stats.
How every game is built
Difficulty isn't random. Every Quick 10 game has the same spread: two easy, three medium, three hard, one expert and one very hard. The order is shuffled, which is why a question you breeze through can be followed by one that stops you cold. It's also why scores are comparable from one game to the next: nobody gets a secretly easy set.
No game leans on one subject either: at most two questions from any topic. The bank spans twenty topics, Places, History, Science, Music, Culture, Sports, Nature, Movies, Food, Technology, TV, Space, Games, Brands, Books, Language, Human Body, Art, Mythology and Everyday Math, and each question wears its topic as a coloured chip while you play.
Scoring, and why speed matters (but never beats being right)
A right answer pays 100 points if you tap it the instant the choices appear, sliding down to 80 at the fifteen-second buzzer, about 1.3 points for every second you take. A wrong answer or a timeout pays zero. So a correct answer at the buzzer is still worth four-fifths of a perfect one, and no amount of speed rescues a wrong answer.
In practice that means accuracy decides who's good and speed decides who's first. Two players with nine right answers are separated by how quickly they got them; a player with nine right will almost always beat a player with eight, however fast the eight were.
The leaderboards
Trivia has more boards than you might expect, because each one answers a different question.
Ratings and titles: the road to Grand Master
This is the part chess players will recognise. Every question you answer is compared with everyone else who answered that exact same question. Beat their points and your rating goes up; fall short and it goes down. Because you're only ever compared like with like, you can't farm it with easy games: an easy question that everyone gets right, fast, moves nobody much.
Your rating starts near 1,200, which is the typical player, and climbs through seven titles:
Volume matters as well as points. You get your first title once 30 of your answers can be compared with other players' (a question counts once at least three people have answered it, so a game gives you about eight). The top titles need a proven record: Candidate Master 100 compared answers (about 12 games), Master 150 (about 19), International Master 250 (about 30) and Grand Master 400 (about 50). A brilliant first week can put your form at Grand Master level, but your points stop just below each title until the record is there (Expert tops out at 1,499 until 100 answers), so points and title always match, and your profile shows your form so you can see where you're heading. Ratings refresh every few minutes, so a promotion can land a game after the one that earned it.
Titles from Candidate Master up show under your name on the Trivia leaderboards, and your full ladder, with exactly what the next title needs, is on your Trivia profile.
Your Trivia profile
Every player with a username gets a public Trivia profile at playoutlier.com/yourname/trivia. It's the whole record in one place: games played, average, best game, your title and rating points with your rank on the Ratings board, the full title ladder with your rung marked, every topic you've played with its rating, and your games, twenty to a page, each one labelled Game N or Classic.
Top-10% finishes get a TOP N% badge on the games, average and best tiles, the same way the word game cards do. Your main OUTLIER profile carries a Trivia card with your title and points that opens your Trivia profile, and if you'd rather keep Trivia to yourself, the profile menu has a Hide Trivia card switch. Your own view is always at /trivia/me.
Sharing, challenges and bragging rights
Every result has a share button and its own card image. Share a Quick 10 result and it names the Game, like Game 37, and the link is a challenge: whoever opens it is dealt that exact Game, the same ten questions in the same order, unless they've already played it. When they finish, they get a head-to-head against your score and a Send it back button.
Play Game 37, the same ten questions. Beat my 740.
Daily results share the Day number instead, and every leaderboard, every Game board and every Trivia profile has its own link and card, so whatever you send unfurls with the right picture.
Tips from the top of the board
Read, then tap. The clock doesn't start until GO, so use the reveal to read the whole question. Most wrong answers on the easy questions are misreads, not gaps in knowledge.
Don't panic on the very hard one. Every game has exactly one, and most players miss it. A calm guess costs you nothing a blank wouldn't, and a right answer there is where ratings are won.
Spread your topics. Topic titles need answers in that topic, and a broad player collects titles faster than a specialist.
Play the Daily every day. It's one go, it's ten minutes of your morning at most, and the all-days board rewards turning up.