Krillion vs Noillirk: The Same Question, Scored Both Ways

Krillion and Noillirk ask the same kind of question and score it in opposite directions. In Krillion you win by giving the correct answer the fewest people give; your krill sinks deeper into the ocean with every rare pick. In Noillirk you win by giving the answer the most people give, the survey's number one, and your krill rises under a bunch of balloons toward space. The name is the joke: Noillirk is Krillion spelled backwards.

Both are free, both run in the browser with no sign-up, and both are built by us. If you like one, the other will feel familiar for about ten seconds and then strange in a good way, because the instinct that wins one round loses the next.

Take a question like 'Name something you take to the beach'. In Krillion, 'towel' and 'sunscreen' are the bottom of the barrel: everyone says them, so they score the minimum. You want something true but unexpected, like a windbreak or a kite. In Noillirk the same towel might be the top answer on the survey board, and the windbreak barely gets you off the ground.

Neither game accepts nonsense. Krillion checks your answer against a bank of valid answers, and a wrong one is simply refused so you can type again while the clock runs. Noillirk judges against its survey board in the same way. What changes is only the direction of the reward, which turns out to change everything about how you think.

The score in both games is a distance. In Krillion every point sinks your krill 10 metres, so a perfect seven-prompt dive of 700 points reaches 7,000 metres. The ocean is mapped in 138 hand-named zones, and the first 11,000 metres follow the real sea: sunlit shallows, kelp, the twilight zone where daylight runs out, anglerfish territory, the Titanic wreck at about 3,800 metres, hydrothermal vents, the hadal zone and Challenger Deep. Endless mode keeps going past the real ocean into invented places such as a glass orchard and a drowned skyline, down to a shrine at 250 km.

Noillirk runs the other way up. Your krill hangs from balloons in a pond on the forest floor and climbs through the understory and the canopy, past low clouds, a thunderhead, cruising altitude and the stratosphere, over the Karman line into orbit, out past the Moon and the planets to the Oort cloud, and on through Alpha Centauri, the Orion Nebula and Andromeda to the last light. The time of day follows your height rather than the clock on your wall: a bright morning in the forest, sunset around cruising altitude, night in the upper air and a sunrise at the height of the space station.

A classic game in either is seven prompts. A Krillion prompt gives you 25 seconds; a Noillirk prompt gives you 15. Both start with a 3-second count-in so you can read the question, and neither pays anything for speed.

The difference is deliberate. Finding a rare answer is a search. The first answers your memory hands you are the common ones, the same ones it hands everybody, so a good Krillion round spends most of its time walking past them into territory the crowd never reaches. That takes time, and 25 seconds is about what a careful search needs.

Finding the number one answer is not a search at all. The commonest answer comes to mind in a second or two, for you and for everyone else. The hard part is judgement: you usually have three strong candidates and have to decide which one the crowd puts first. Fifteen seconds is long enough to weigh them and short enough that you cannot talk yourself out of a good instinct. When we built Noillirk, Krillion's 25 seconds turned out to be mostly waiting.

Both games use six tiers worth the same points, each rung double the last up to a ceiling of 100. Here they are from the bottom up.

• 4 points: Plankton in Krillion (the answer everyone gives). Grounded in Noillirk (nobody else said it).
• 8 points: Too Clever in Krillion (the clever pick everyone else also thought of). Treetop in Noillirk (hardly anyone said it).
• 16 points: Schooler in Krillion. Kite in Noillirk (off the board, but a few said it).
• 32 points: Rare in Krillion. Cloud Nine in Noillirk (on the survey board).
• 64 points: Deep Cut in Krillion. Jet Stream in Noillirk (in the top four, but not first).
• 100 points: One in a Krillion in Krillion. Sky High in Noillirk (the single number one answer).

There is an asymmetry worth knowing. In Krillion the top tier is wide: our analysis of Krillion's prompt banks found that 14.7% of all accepted answers are One in a Krillion, and a prompt accepts 137 different answers on average. There are many ways to be rare. In Noillirk the top is a single answer per prompt, and an answer that is not on the survey board at all can never score above Cloud Nine, however sensible it sounds. Krillion rewards breadth; Noillirk rewards precision.

It is tempting to think the games train opposite skills. They train the same one: a model of what the crowd will say.

To win at Krillion you need to know where the crowd goes so you can go elsewhere. Cat, Dog and Paris are each in Krillion's bottom tier on 15 or more different prompts, because they are what people reach for. To win at Noillirk you need exactly that knowledge, used straight. Titanic is in Krillion's bottom tier on 22 different prompts. The player who sees that coming steers clear of it in Krillion and, on the right survey question, plays it with confidence in Noillirk.

What differs is the second step. In Krillion, once you have mapped the crowd, you still need the knowledge to stand outside it: a specific species, a regional dish, a technical term. In Noillirk you need to rank the crowd's choices correctly, and that depends on who the crowd is. Survey questions in the style made famous by Family Feud are about ordinary life, and the top answer is usually the most everyday one, not the most correct or the most interesting. Experts can do worse at Noillirk than they expect, because they know too much to think like a hundred people answering in the street. There is more on that in our guide on how to get better at Noillirk.

Both games have an Endless mode on three tanks of air, one prompt at a time. In Krillion a prompt where nothing is accepted, because the clock ran out or you passed, costs a tank, and a One in a Krillion answer gives one back, up to three. Noillirk mirrors it: a miss costs a tank, and a Sky High answer, the survey's number one, gives one back. In both, any accepted answer keeps you going, however low it scores, so a safe answer is never a strike.

• Play Krillion when you have time and want to feel clever. A round rewards recall and specialist knowledge, and the reveal of what the crowd said is often the funniest part. It is also the better game for one person with a wide head for facts.
• Play Noillirk when you want something quick and social. Fifteen-second clocks make it fast, and arguing over what most people would say is the classic family game-night argument, so it suits a group around one screen.
• Play both back to back to train the shared skill. A Noillirk round sharpens your sense of the obvious answer, and that is exactly the answer you need to steer away from in Krillion.
• Play Krillion with friends in Dive Together. Its rooms put up to 75 players on the same prompt at once, on a shared clock, and the reveal shows every answer in the room with its tier.

Start with seven prompts in Krillion Unlimited, where there is no daily cap, and note which of your answers the game called Plankton. Then switch to Noillirk and see how many of those same instincts take you straight to Sky High. The Krillion game will tell you how well you avoid the crowd; Noillirk will tell you how well you know it.