Wormillion, the daily geography digging game

What is Wormillion?

Wormillion is a free daily geography game with a twist: it doesn’t ask whether you know a place, it asks whether you know one nobody else does. Ten prompts, thirty seconds each. Name any real river, lake, mountain, desert, island, sea, country, capital or city that fits, and the more obscure your answer, the deeper your worm digs and the more you score. Everyone knows the Nile - nobody digs deep on the Nile.

There are 32,843 real places in the bank, every one linked to a Wikipedia article, and a new dig every day. No sign-up needed, no ads, nothing to install; it runs in any browser and fits a phone.

How to play Wormillion

1. Read the prompt. It names a category - Name a river - and often a condition: Name a river with a T in it, Name a country in Southeast Asia, Name a lake smaller than 100 km².
2. Type a place and press Dig. Spelling is corrected, not punished, and the real spelling is shown.
3. If it fits, the worm digs. How far depends only on how obscure the place is within its category - 0% for the most-read article, 100% for the least. An answer scores between 100 and 1,000 points.
4. If it doesn’t fit, you’re told why - wrong category, outside the region, missing the letter - and you keep guessing. Wrong answers cost nothing but seconds.
5. Thirty seconds, then the next round. Stuck? Skip. Ten rounds make a dig; your depth and score are the sum of them.

Play today’s digThe full rules

The obscurity tiers, with real examples

Every accepted answer lands in a tier, and the results after a dig show one gem per round, finer the more obscure. Here they are with real rivers from the bank - the same scale applies in every category.

Obscurity is measured against the whole category, whatever the condition on the prompt: a river in Europe scores what it would on a plain river round.

How to actually dig deep

1. Reach for the second one you think of. The first name that comes to mind is the one that comes to everyone’s mind. The Ganges is a household name; one of its tributaries is a deep cut.
2. Treat a tight condition as a gift. A condition narrows what is accepted, never how it scores, so a less familiar river in Europe digs as deep as it would on any river round.
3. Small countries hide rare capitals. A capital scores on its own fame, not its country’s. The capital of a country nobody visits is usually one in Wormillion.
4. On a letter rule, check the name. The current edition checks the place’s full name as shown in Places, including “Lake”, “Mount” or “River” when they are part of that name. Accents and punctuation do not get in the way.
5. Guess early, guess often. A wrong answer costs nothing, and the game’s hint tells you exactly what was wrong. Thirty seconds is longer than it feels if you’re typing, and shorter if you’re thinking.

Why a huge place can score nothing

Wormillion doesn’t measure size. It measures how many people look a place up, because that is what “obscure” actually means. The Caspian Sea is the largest lake on earth and one of the most-read; a mid-sized lake in the African rift that almost nobody visits the page for pays out far more. Vatican City is the smallest country in the world by every measure and one of the most famous, so it scores like the famous place it is. Every place in the bank carries the average of 59 complete days of Wikipedia views, ranked within its category - which is why the difference between the tenth-most-read river and the hundredth is worth more than the difference between the first and the tenth.

Every prompt that can appear

Nine categories. Each dig draws every category once and one of them twice; some rounds are plain and others carry a condition. Here is each category with the plain prompt, a few of the conditions it can draw, and three real answers at three depths.

Frequently asked questions

Play today’s digEvery place in the bankPast digs