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Noillirkthe most common answer wins
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Noillirk - Guess the Most Common Answer

The most common answer wins: one survey prompt, one answer, and the whole sky over you. The answer everybody gives lifts you highest; the one nobody else gives leaves you on the ground. This is Noillirk: a climb from a pond on the forest floor to the edge of the universe, with no daily limit.

How to play the Noillirk game

The rules, the tiers, and the questions people ask.

How to play

  1. 1A survey prompt appears and a 25-second clock starts. Type one answer.
  2. 2Only the survey's number one answer is worth the most. The rest of its top nine lift you less, and the one nobody else gives barely lifts you.
  3. 3Every point lifts you higher, from the forest floor up through the canopy and into the sky. 700 points reaches 14 km: a perfect climb.
  4. 4A wrong answer is refused, not punished. It costs you the seconds it took.

Questions

What is the Noillirk game?

Noillirk is a free browser game about guessing the most common answer. You get 7 survey prompts, 25 seconds each, and one answer per prompt. Everybody can answer "Name something people lose all the time". The game is about whether you pick the answer most people would pick: keys, or phone, or glasses. Common answers lift you higher, and your height is your score.

How is Noillirk scored?

Every accepted answer lands in one of six tiers, worth 4, 8, 16, 32, 64 and 100 points: grounded, treetop, kite, cloud nine, jet stream, sky high. The tier is set by where your answer sits on the survey's board. Only the single top answer reaches Sky High; the next three reach Jet Stream and the next five reach Cloud Nine. Everything off that board of nine lands lower, by how many other people would have said it. A perfect 700-point climb reaches 14 km. A refused answer scores nothing and costs only the time you spent on it.

What do Grounded, Treetop, Kite, Cloud Nine, Jet Stream and Sky High mean?

They are the six tiers an accepted answer can land in, from the rarest to the most common. Grounded is an answer nobody else gave, worth 4 points. Sky High is the answer everybody gives, the top of the board, worth 100. Several answers are usually close to the top, which is what makes picking the one that wins hard.

How do you get a good score in the Noillirk game?

Answer for the crowd, not for yourself. Say the general word rather than a specific one (keys, not car keys), think about what a typical person would blurt out first, and when two answers feel tied, pick the one you would hear from a child or a grandparent. The clever answer is the one that scores least.

What is Endless mode?

One prompt at a time, for as long as you last, on 3 balloons. A miss pops a balloon; a Sky High answer gives one back. The prompts get harder the higher you are. A perfect classic climb stays inside the weather, and space begins at 100 km: only an endless climb gets there, and past it the Moon, the planets, the Sun, the stars and the galaxy, up to 46.5B ly.

Can you play Noillirk multiplayer?

Yes. Press Play multiplayer on the start screen and pick a live room of up to 30 players, or start your own. Everyone gets the same prompt at the same moment, with 25 seconds to answer. After each prompt you see what everyone said and how many points it scored, and the highest climber at the end wins. No host, no sign-up.

Is the Noillirk game free, and how often can I play?

Noillirk is free, and you can play as often as you like. There is no sign-up, no app and no daily cap: refresh and it deals 7 more prompts from a bank of thousands. It runs in the browser, so it plays the same on a phone as on a laptop.

How high does Noillirk go?

Every altitude on the way is a real one. You start at a pond on the forest floor on a bright morning, climb out through the canopy over a valley of fields and lakes, then past skyscrapers, mountains, airliners and weather balloons, through sunset and night, to the edge of space. From there the climb follows real distances: the Moon at 384,400 km, each planet at its closest to Earth, the Sun, the nearest stars, the centre of the galaxy and, at the top, the edge of the observable universe. 52 zones in all.

Is there a reverse Krillion, where the most common answer wins?

Yes, Noillirk is the opposite of Krillion. Krillion pays for the rarest correct answer, the one nobody else thinks of, and you sink deeper for it. Noillirk turns that rule around: the most common answer pays the most, and you climb instead of sinking. The survey prompts, the 25-second clock and the six tiers work the same way in both, so they make a pair: one asks what nobody would say, the other what everybody would.

What does Noillirk mean?

It is Krillion spelled backwards, because it is Krillion played backwards. In Krillion you sink deeper by naming what nobody else names; in Noillirk you climb higher by naming what everybody names. The krill is the same krill, now holding a bunch of balloons.

More ways to play

Want a score against everyone else? Today's puzzle and the Global Gauntlet both put you on a leaderboard. More remakes: Songless Unlimited, Krillion, Bandle Unlimited, Size It Up, Fermi, CaseGuessr, MapTap, Poople, Silverbrook and Songspot.

The game in a sentence

What is Noillirk?

Noillirk is a survey game: every prompt has many right answers, and the one that most people would give is worth the most.

Most quizzes ask what you know. The Noillirk game asks what everybody knows, and which of it they would say first. A prompt such as "Name something people lose all the time" is open, so dozens of answers are correct, but they are not equal: keys, phone and glasses all feel like the top answer, and only one of them is. Reading the crowd is the whole skill.

Noillirk deals 7 prompts a climb with 25 seconds for each, and the score is a height. You start at a pond on the forest floor on a bright morning, and every point lifts you up through the trees, into the sky and eventually into space.

tiers, from Grounded to Sky High
6
points for the answer everybody gives
100
the altitude of a perfect 700-point climb
14 km

The word

What does noillirk mean?

It is Krillion, spelled backwards and played backwards.

Krillion, the game this one mirrors, pays for the rarest correct answer: the one krill that did something different from the swarm, and the ocean you sink through is the score. Noillirk turns both rules over. The answer the swarm gives is the one that pays, and instead of sinking, the krill rises on a bunch of balloons.

The two games use the same idea from opposite ends: every open question has a crowded head of answers everybody gives and a long tail of answers almost nobody gives. Krillion sends you into the tail. Noillirk asks you to find the very top of the head, which is harder than it sounds when four answers are nearly tied.

A short history

Where the survey quiz comes from

Counting what people say first is older than television.

  1. 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. Their category norms show a few answers taking most of the votes in every category.

  2. 1976

    The survey quiz

    Family Feud goes on air in the United States. A hundred people are surveyed, and contestants score by naming the answers they gave, most of all the top one. Britain's version, Family Fortunes, follows in 1980.

  3. 2009

    The survey, inverted

    The BBC quiz Pointless keeps the hundred-person survey and flips the aim, rewarding the answers fewest people gave. Krillion plays that way too.

  4. Now

    Back the right way up

    The Noillirk game keeps the survey's original aim, the most popular answer, and grades each answer on how common it is among people at large, from the survey's top answer down to one nobody else gave.

Why it works

Why do so many people give the same answer?

Ask a room to name something in a junk drawer and most of the room says the same handful of things. 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 comes out first

    Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman named the availability heuristic in 1973: what comes to mind most easily gets treated as the most likely. In this game, the most available answer to most people is the one that pays.

  • People meet without talking

    Thomas Schelling showed in 1960 that people who cannot confer still converge on focal points, the choices that seem natural to everyone. A survey answer is a focal point, and this game is about finding it.

The trap at the top

Why your own first answer is not always the top one

The answer that comes to you first is usually common. It is not always the most common.

John Maynard Keynes described the problem in 1936 with his newspaper beauty contest, where the winning move is not to pick the face you like best but the one you think average opinion will pick. A survey game is exactly that contest. Your own life leaks into your first answer: a driver thinks of car keys, a parent of a lost sock, a student of a pen.

The fix is to answer as the average person rather than as yourself, and to prefer the plain, general word. When several answers feel equally obvious, the top of the board usually belongs to the one that is true for the most people, most of the time.

The method

How to find the most common answer in 25 seconds

Four habits that work on any prompt in Noillirk.

  1. 01

    Say the first three answers to yourself

    The top answer is almost always among the first few that come to mind. Get them all out before you choose.

  2. 02

    Picture a hundred strangers

    Not your friends, not your job, not your country's quirks. Ask which of your three a hundred ordinary people would say most.

  3. 03

    Pick the general word

    Keys, not car keys. Pizza, not pepperoni pizza. The broad word collects every variant, and the variants are what the crowd types.

  4. 04

    Answer in time

    A refused or missing answer scores nothing, and the clock is short. A common answer given in time beats a perfect one given too late.

What each tier is worth
Grounded4 points
Treetop8 points
Kite16 points
Cloud Nine32 points
Jet Stream64 points
Sky High100 points

The real sky

How high is a perfect Noillirk climb?

700 points reaches 14 km. The air above the ground is mapped by atmospheric scientists into layers.

Troposphere, to about 12 km
Where the weather happens and nearly all the air is. Its top is higher at the equator (about 17 km) than at the poles (about 8 km). Airliners cruise near it.
Stratosphere, about 12 to 50 km
Dry, calm and cold at the bottom, warming with height because the ozone layer, mostly between 15 and 35 km, absorbs ultraviolet light.
Mesosphere, about 50 to 85 km
The coldest part of the atmosphere, and where most meteors burn up. Noctilucent clouds, the highest clouds on Earth, form near its top.
The Karman line, 100 km
The boundary most often used for where space begins, named for the engineer Theodore von Karman.
Thermosphere, about 85 to 600 km
Where the aurora glows and where the International Space Station orbits, at about 400 km.

A perfect classic climb stays inside the weather. Endless mode in Noillirk keeps going: past the edge of space to the Moon, each planet at its closest approach to Earth, the Sun, the nearest stars and the centre of the galaxy, through 52 zones in all, and every altitude on the way is a real one.

In this game

How Noillirk turns the crowd into altitude

An accepted answer lands in one of 6 tiers according to how many other people would have given it, from Grounded, the answer nobody else reached, to Sky High, the answer everybody gives. Speed earns nothing: the clock only decides whether you answer at all. A refused answer costs the seconds it took and no more. There is no daily cap either: a new climb is one refresh away.

Sources: Battig and Montague, Category norms of verbal items in 56 categories, Journal of Experimental Psychology Monograph 80 (1969); Van Overschelde, Rawson and Dunlosky, Category norms: an updated and expanded version, Journal of Memory and Language 50 (2004); Eleanor Rosch, Cognitive representations of semantic categories, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 104 (1975); Tversky and Kahneman, Availability: a heuristic for judging frequency and probability, Cognitive Psychology 5 (1973); Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (1960); John Maynard Keynes, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936); U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA, layers of the atmosphere; Federation Aeronautique Internationale, on the 100 km Karman line.