Two modes
Every Outlier Live game is ten rounds on one board, one word locked per round, rarest word taking the round. The play mode decides one thing only: how much time you get.
Every round is the same length, 60 seconds at a standard room, with a 25 second reveal between rounds. This is how Outlier Live has always played, and it is still the default.
The round clock tightens every round, from 60 seconds down to 33, and the reveal is cut to 15 seconds. Nothing else changes.
The Blitz clock, round by round
At a standard 60 second room, the ten rounds run like this. A 90 second room takes the same deductions off a longer start.
| Round | Clock | Deducted |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 60s | – |
| 2 | 55s | −5s |
| 3 | 50s | −5s |
| 4 | 47s | −3s |
| 5 | 44s | −3s |
| 6 | 41s | −3s |
| 7 | 39s | −2s |
| 8 | 37s | −2s |
| 9 | 35s | −2s |
| 10 | 33s | −2s |
10:00 in Regular, 7:21 in Blitz.
13:45 in Regular, 9:36 in Blitz, reveals included.
Why the cuts get smaller
A flat five seconds a round would have landed round 10 at 15 seconds, and almost nobody locks a word that fast: measured across 81,881 real submissions over 14 days, the median word goes in at 31.6 seconds and only 11.6% arrive inside 15. That is not a harder game, it is three rounds where most of the room scores nothing.
So the big cuts sit early, where they are nearly free, and the small cuts sit late, where they bite. Across this curve the share of real submissions that would still land in time falls from 98% in round 1 to 53% in round 10, and never below half. Every round stays a round most of the room can finish.
Where you meet Blitz
The 9:00 PM ET game is Regular, always. The same goes for The Table, the other scheduled slot. Those are the games people turn up for at a set time and the ones a record is read off, so the rules do not change underneath them.
A host picks the mode when they create the room, next to the board type and the timer. Whatever you pick is what everybody in the room plays.
Some of the open games waiting in the lobby are dealt Blitz, so you run into it without it taking over. In a Blitz room the reveal between rounds tells you the next round’s clock and how many seconds came off it.
Again means the same game. A rematch keeps the mode of the game it came from.
What Blitz does not change
Blitz is a clock, not a variant. Everything a word is worth, and everything the board does, is the same game you already know.
The board
The same 5x5 grid for everyone in the room, drawn from the same pool. Blitz is not a board type and never masks a letter.
The dictionary
The same words count, and the same ones do not. Nothing is ruled out because the clock is shorter.
The scoring
Rarity decides the round, up to 100 points a round and 1,000 for the game. A word is worth what it is worth, whenever you lock it.
Ten rounds
Blitz is not a shorter game by round count. You still lock one word in each of ten rounds.
Burned words
A word anybody played in an earlier round will not count again, so the obvious answers keep disappearing.
Playing a Blitz well
The first four rounds are the ones with room in them, and they are also the rounds where the burned-word rule has taken the least off the board. Spend the time you still have there: a rare word found in round 2 is worth exactly what it would be worth in round 10, and in round 10 you may not get to it.
Late on, lock something. Anything beats an empty hand, because nothing scores zero, and at 33 seconds the word you can see is usually better than the word you are still hunting. The reveal between rounds is shorter too, so read the standings quickly and get your eyes back on the grid.
Go deeper
The full write-up is in the guide to Outlier Live play modes. For the game everybody turns up to at nine, read Outlier Live Daily, and the FAQ covers the rest of Live.