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. Underneath that simple surface sits a very large game: a bank of 20,000 questions, 1,999 numbered games you can tackle in any order, a daily set the whole world plays together, twenty topics with a leaderboard each, 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 up to 100 points, more the faster you tap, with a floor of 80 if you get there at the buzzer. Pick wrong, or let the clock run out, and you score nothing for that question. Ten right, fast answers is exactly 1,000.
Here is the shape of one: Food, easy, four choices, fifteen seconds. It was written for this guide rather than lifted out of the game, because a real question is worth meeting cold.
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 Ten is whenever you like, as often as you like, across 1,999 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. It goes live at the same moment the word game board drops, a fresh set of ten questions, 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.
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, and a board for every topic. Today's Ten questions are written only for the Daily: they never show up in Quick Ten, and Quick Ten questions never show up here.
Quick Ten: 1,999 games, pick your own path
Quick Ten is the one you play on the train, in a queue, or at 1am because you can't sleep. There's no schedule, and there's no running out of it. The whole question bank, 20,000 questions, is split once into 1,999 fixed games, Game 1 through Game 1999, and no question appears in two 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 Ten 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, and what the range feels like
Difficulty isn't random. Every Quick Ten 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.
Those five words mean very little until you see them. The five below were written for this guide and appear in no OUTLIER game, but each one sits at the right rung, in the right shape, on a real topic. The questions you actually meet are kept for the game.
That is the shape of a game. The first two are there so you start moving, the middle six are where most boards are won and lost, and the last two are the ones people screenshot.
Which effect explains why a spinning ball curves in flight?
Science, very hard, and ours rather than the game's. The answer is the Magnus effect.
All twenty topics, and what is actually in them
The bank is built topic by topic, and there are twenty of them: Art, Books, Brands, Culture, Everyday Math, Food, Games, History, Human Body, Language, Movies, Music, Mythology, Nature, Places, Science, Space, Sports, Technology and TV. Each one holds 1,000 questions, and each one has its own leaderboard.
Every question wears its topic as a coloured chip while you play, so you always know what you're being asked about. Here is what each of the twenty feels like, one example at a time. Every example below was written for this guide and appears in no game: the point is to show you the register, not to hand you an answer key.
Twenty topics at a thousand questions each is the whole 20,000, and it is why the spread of a game feels so wide: Everyday Math and Mythology are equally likely to turn up next.
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. 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 answer you give is compared with everyone else who answered that exact same question, and beating them on right-and-fast raises your rating. 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.
Six titles sit above the unrated rungs, and each one asks for points and for a record long enough to trust them.
Volume matters as well as points. You aren't rated at all until 30 of your answers have been compared with other players', and the higher bands ask for a longer record still: Candidate Master 100 compared answers, Master 150, International Master 250, Grand Master 400. A brilliant first week can put your form well above your title, and the points you see are held at the top of the band your record covers until it catches up, so points and title always agree.
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. The rating has a guide of its own: how the Trivia rating is worked out, and how to raise it goes through the whole thing, topic by topic.
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 a page at a time, 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 Ten 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. There are twenty of them and a title in each, 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.