The game
What is Krillion?
Krillion is a rarest-answer trivia game: every prompt has many right answers, and the one that fewest people would give is worth the most.
Most quizzes ask what you know. The Krillion game asks what you know that other people do not. A prompt such as "Name a bird" is open, so a hundred answers are correct, but they are not equal: the answer on everyone's lips barely moves you, and an obscure answer that is still right sends you to the sea floor. It is general knowledge played against the crowd, not against a question setter.
Krillion Unlimited deals 7 prompts a dive with 25 seconds for each, and the score is a depth: every point sinks you 10 metres.
- rarity tiers, from Plankton to One in a Krillion
- 6
- points for an answer nobody else gives
- 100
- the depth of a perfect 700-point dive
- 7,000 m
The name
What does krillion mean?
A krillion is not a real number. It is a pun with a small crustacean inside it.
English has a family of invented big numbers, zillion, jillion and gazillion among them, which the linguist Stephen Chrisomalis has named indefinite hyperbolic numerals. They borrow the ending of million and billion to mean more than anyone could count. Krillion swaps in krill, and the phrase it belongs to is a play on one in a million. It comes from the 2011 animated film Happy Feet Two, directed by George Miller, where Will the Krill, voiced by Brad Pitt, leaves his swarm and announces: "I am one in a krillion."
The joke works because of what krill are. Antarctic krill, Euphausia superba, grow to about six centimetres and gather in swarms that can reach 30,000 animals to the cubic metre. Their combined weight is estimated at about 379 million tonnes, among the largest totals for any single wild animal species, and they rise towards the surface at night and sink by day. The word itself is Norwegian, for the small fry of fish. To be one in a krillion is to be the single krill that did something different from the swarm, which is exactly what the Krillion game pays for.
A short history
Where the rarest-answer quiz comes from
The format is an old one turned upside down.
1969
Psychologists count the answers
William Battig and William Montague ask hundreds of American students to list members of 56 categories, "a bird", "a fruit", and publish how often each answer was given, replicating and extending an American study of 1957. Their category norms are the best-known rarity tables in psychology.
1976
The survey quiz
Family Feud goes on air in the United States. A hundred people are surveyed and contestants win by naming the most popular answer. Britain's version, Family Fortunes, follows in 1980.
1988
Duplicates score nothing
The party game Scattergories makes originality the rule at the table: an answer another player also wrote down earns no point.
2009
The survey, inverted
The BBC quiz Pointless, first broadcast on BBC Two on 24 August 2009, keeps the hundred-person survey and flips the aim: the fewer of the hundred who gave your answer, the better, and an answer none of them gave is a pointless answer, the best there is.
Now
The crowd is everyone
The Krillion game drops the panel of a hundred and grades an answer on how familiar it is to people at large, which is why one prompt can run from the first answer anyone gives to one that almost nobody reaches.
Why it works
Why is everyone's first answer the same answer?
Ask a room to name a bird and most of the room says the same two or three birds. Cognitive psychology has known why for fifty years.
Categories have favourites
Eleanor Rosch's prototype theory, from the 1970s, showed that categories are built around best examples. A robin is a better bird than a penguin in everybody's head, so it is named first and named by everyone.
Easy to recall feels right
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman named the availability heuristic in 1973: what comes to mind most easily gets treated as the most likely and the most important. In this game the most available answer is the cheapest one.
The tail is long
In the counted norms, a few answers take most of the votes and hundreds of correct ones are each given by almost nobody. In one British study of 2022, more than half of all the different answers collected were given by a single person. Every prompt has that shape: a crowded head and a long, quiet tail where the points are.
Said once is the usual case
Linguists have a name for a word that turns up only once in a text: a hapax legomenon, Greek for said once. In a large body of writing, words used exactly once typically make up between two fifths and three fifths of all the different words in it. Answers to an open prompt behave the same way, so a right answer only one person would give is not a freak. It is where most of the variety lives.
The trap in the middle
Why the Too Clever answer is not the rare one
The second tier from the bottom is there to punish the answer that feels original and is not.
Once players know the obvious answer is worthless, they all skip it and land on the same second thought. The economist Thomas Schelling described this in The Strategy of Conflict in 1960: people who cannot confer still converge on focal points, the choices that seem natural to everyone. John Maynard Keynes made the same observation about markets in 1936 with his newspaper beauty contest, where the winning move is to guess what average opinion expects average opinion to be.
A rarest-answer game is that contest in reverse. You are trying not to meet the crowd, and the crowd is trying not to meet you, so the clever answer fills up fast. The real rarities lie a step further out: the specialist's example, the regional one, the member of the category that is correct and that nobody thinks of as typical.
The method
How to find the uncommon answer in 25 seconds
Four habits that work on any prompt in Krillion Unlimited.
01
Say the obvious answer, then bin it
Your first answer is the prototype. Naming it to yourself clears it out of the way and tells you what the crowd will say.
02
Bin the second one too
The answer that arrives next is usually the focal point for everyone who thought the same way you just did.
03
Change the angle, not the effort
Rare answers come from a different slice of the category: another country, another century, a trade you have worked in, the smallest or oldest member.
04
Stay inside the prompt
An answer that is not accepted scores nothing, so obscure only pays when it is unarguably correct. Pick the rarest answer you are sure of, not the rarest you can imagine.
| Plankton | 4 points, 40 m |
|---|---|
| Too Clever | 8 points, 80 m |
| Schooler | 16 points, 160 m |
| Rare | 32 points, 320 m |
| Deep Cut | 64 points, 640 m |
| One in a Krillion | 100 points, 1,000 m |
The real ocean
How deep is a perfect Krillion dive?
700 points is 7,000 m, and the water on the way down is mapped by oceanographers into five zones.
- Sunlight zone, to 200 m
- The epipelagic. Enough light for photosynthesis, and home to most of the life people picture when they think of the sea.
- Twilight zone, 200 to 1,000 m
- The mesopelagic. Light fades to nothing. Vast numbers of animals shelter here by day and climb at night to feed, the largest daily migration on Earth.
- Midnight zone, 1,000 to 4,000 m
- The bathypelagic. No sunlight at all, near-freezing water, and the light that exists is made by animals.
- Abyssal zone, 4,000 to 6,000 m
- The abyssopelagic, over the great flat plains that make up most of the ocean floor.
- Hadal zone, below 6,000 m
- The ocean trenches, for the most part. The Danish oceanographer Anton Bruun proposed the name in 1956, after Hades, the Greek underworld.
- Challenger Deep, about 10,935 m
- The deepest known point of the ocean, in the Mariana Trench of the western Pacific.
A perfect classic dive ends 1,000 m into the hadal zone. Endless mode in Krillion Unlimited keeps going, past the depth of any real trench, into an ocean that was drawn for the game.
In this game
How Krillion Unlimited turns rarity into depth
Rarity decides the points, and nothing else does: not speed, and not a reach that misses.
An accepted answer lands in one of 6 tiers according to how many other people would have given it, from Plankton, the answer everyone gives, to One in a Krillion, the one nobody else reached. Speed earns nothing: the clock only decides whether you answer at all. A refused answer costs the seconds it took and no more, so a reach is always worth trying. There is no daily cap either: a new dive is one refresh away.
Vocabulary
Rare answer terms, defined
The words for counting answers, for the ones hardly anybody gives, and for the animal the game is named after.
- Pointless answer
- On the BBC quiz Pointless, a correct answer that none of the hundred people surveyed gave. The best score that show offers.
- Category norms
- Published tallies of how often people name each member of a category when asked to list them. Battig and Montague's tables of 1969 are the classic set.
- Long tail
- The many items in a distribution that each turn up rarely but together outnumber the few common ones.
- Hapax legomenon
- A word that occurs only once in a text or a body of texts. From the Greek for said once; the plural is hapax legomena.
- Indefinite hyperbolic numeral
- The linguist's term for a made-up big number such as zillion, gazillion or krillion: a word for more than anyone could count.
- Krill
- Small shrimp-like crustaceans that swarm in the open ocean, and the food of whales, seals and penguins. The word is Norwegian, for the small fry of fish.
- Dive
- One game of Krillion Unlimited: 7 prompts, with your score shown as the depth you reach.