How to Play Krillocity: One Race Explained, Prompt by Prompt

Krillocity is a free race to name as many answers as you can. Everyone gets the same prompt, such as Name a book made into a film, and 30 seconds to type every answer they can think of. Each answer the game accepts swims your krill forward, and the rarer it is, the further it goes. After three prompts, whoever has swum furthest wins.

It is the race mode of Krillion Unlimited, and it runs in any browser with nothing to sign up for. The easiest way to learn it is to watch a race, so this guide follows one from the lobby to the payout.

• 3 prompts in an open race, each on a 30-second clock, with 2 seconds to read it before the clock starts.
• 6 racers in an open race. A private race seats anywhere from 2 to 12.
• 6 tiers for an accepted answer, worth from 40 m to 1,000 m.
• About 2 minutes from the start line to the results.

We made a private race for three racers, Coral, Finn and Pip, from the Private race key on the start screen. Its lobby shows a six-digit code, a box for each lane and a chat panel. In a private race the host presses Start. An open race, the one Race now puts you in, starts by itself the moment its six lanes fill, or once at least two racers have waited 45 seconds for more.

A small judge krill swims the prompt card down, the count-in reads 2, 1, and the clock starts. Enter sends an answer and clears the box at once, so the next one can follow without a tap. Each answer shows as a chip under the prompt: first with a small square while it is judged, then with the metres it swam.

Finn went for speed. Jurassic Park, The Godfather and Jaws swam 40 m each, and Fight Club 80 m. Coral typed the same number of titles but reached past the first ones that came to mind. Harry Potter swam 40 m and Dune 80 m, and Holes and The Princess Bride were worth 160 m apiece.

When the clock ran out, Coral had swum 440 m, Finn 200 m and Pip 160 m. Four answers each, and Coral was more than twice as far as Finn.

Every prompt has a bank of the answers people give, ranked by how often each one comes up. Where your answer sits in that ranking sets its tier:

• Plankton, 40 m: the answers nearly everyone gives. Harry Potter, Jaws, Stephen King.
• Too Clever, 80 m: the clever pick that plenty of others thought of too.
• Schooler, 160 m: known, but not what comes first. Holes, The Princess Bride.
• Rare, 320 m: few people would reach for it.
• Deep Cut, 640 m: true obscurity.
• One in a Krillion, 1,000 m: nobody else is down here.

Spelling is forgiven, and the chip shows the bank's own spelling: when Coral typed chips for Name a snack in another race, it came back as Crisps. The same answer twice counts once, however it is spelled. A refused answer costs nothing but the seconds spent typing it.

An answer the bank does not know goes to an AI judge, which checks that it really fits the prompt. The judge looks at up to 12 such answers from each racer on each prompt, and once 3 of them are refused it stops looking at new ones until the next prompt. Answers the bank knows still count after that. Real obscure answers keep being judged, and typing nonsense quickly gets you nowhere.

Word prompts have hundreds of right answers, so they reward volume. Pip's question, education and emotion swam 40 m each, but lotion, a word few people would think of first, swam 160 m and carried Pip past Finn. Finn's fiction made 80 m and action 40 m.

Nothing stops between prompts. TIME! shows for a second, the judge krill brings the next card down over the last one, and the standings beside the track keep moving. Overtakes are called out over the lanes as they happen.

Coral led going into the final prompt, so Finn needed big answers, and found two: dreidel and washing machine swam 80 m each. With 20 seconds left Finn was ahead by 4 m. Then Coral's next answer landed, and the line over Finn's lanes read Coral passed you.

When the last clock runs out, FINISH! comes up and the judge krill waves a chequered flag. Answers still with the judge get a few seconds to land, and then the race's board shows everyone's distance: Coral 600 m, Finn 560 m, Pip 480 m.

A race pays places, not metres. Each racer who scored earns 1,000 depth tokens for every scoring racer they finish ahead of, counting up to five, and the winner gets 500 more, so winning a full six-racer race pays 5,500. Coral beat two racers and won, for 2,500. Finn beat one, for 1,000. Last place pays nothing, and a tie beats nobody. The tokens go into the same wallet you use in Krillion Unlimited and are spent in its shop, on avatars and emotes that swim with you in the race.

Then the lobby comes back over the start line with your place, your distance and what it paid, and the same racers can go again straight away.

Ten Plankton answers on each of the three prompts would come to 1,200 m. The leaderboard keeps each player's longest race, and only races of 1,000 m or more make it onto the board. When we wrote this, every race in its top ten was longer than 8 km.

Getting there takes a different skill from knowing the rules, and our Krillocity strategy guide is about exactly that. To race people you know instead of strangers, see how to set up a private race. Or line up for a race now.