Wormillion › How to play
How to play Wormillion
Ten rounds. Thirty seconds each. Name any real place that fits the prompt - the more obscure it is, the deeper your worm digs and the more you score.
The idea
Everyone knows the Nile. Nobody digs deep on the Nile. Wormillion scores a place by how obscure it is - measured in monthly English-Wikipedia pageviews, not size or population - so the answer that pays is the one you know that most people don’t. Lake Baikal is a fraction of the Caspian’s area, but plenty of people read about it; a mid-sized African lake almost nobody visits the page for pays out far more.
A round
- A prompt appears: Name a river. Later rounds add a condition: Name a river with a T in it.
- Type a place. Spelling is corrected, not punished - the real spelling is shown.
- If it fits, your worm digs a distance set by the answer’s obscurity, and you score between 75 and 1,500 points.
- If it doesn’t, you’re told why and can keep guessing until the clock runs out. Wrong answers cost nothing.
- Stuck? Skip. It scores nothing, exactly as if the clock had run out.
Scoring
| Obscurity | Share square | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 0% | 💀 | The most looked-up place in its category. The worm is not pleased. |
| under 25% | 🟫 | A household name. Safe, shallow. |
| 25–50% | 🟧 | Well known. |
| 50–70% | 🟨 | Off the map. A real dig. |
| 70–85% | 🟩 | A deep cut. |
| 85% and up | ⭐ | One in Wormillion: the jackpot tier. Nearly the maximum. |
| 100% | 💎 | The single most obscure place in the category. The full 1,500. |
| miss | ⬜ | Timed out or skipped. |
A condition on a prompt narrows what is accepted; it never changes scoring, which is always against the whole category. “Name a river in Mesopotamia” has two right answers, and each scores what it would on a plain river round.
Today’s dig and Endless
Today’s dig is the same ten prompts for everyone that day, once a day, turning over at midnight on your clock. After it you get a share button (a ten-square grid, one per round, coloured by obscurity), your streak, a review of every prompt with the rarest answer it would have taken, and how your dig compares with everyone else’s that day. Endless is a fresh draw as often as you like. Nothing else differs.
Spelling
Three passes, cheapest first: an exact match, a match ignoring filler words (“Everest” finds Mount Everest), and finally a fuzzy match within a budget that scales with the name’s length. Three guards keep it honest: short names get no slack at all, a tie between two different places is refused rather than guessed, and the budget comes from the name proper, not the generic word around it - “Lake Tåkern” gets the one edit of “Tåkern”, so a lake the bank lacks is refused rather than corrected to Lake Vänern.
Questions
What is Wormillion?
A free daily geography game. Ten prompts, thirty seconds each: name a real place that fits - a river, a lake, a mountain, an island, a country, a capital, a city, a desert, a sea. The more obscure your answer, the deeper your worm digs and the more points you score. No account, no ads, nothing to install.
How is obscurity measured?
By how many people look the place up: its monthly English-Wikipedia pageviews. Not size, not population. The Nile pulls tens of thousands of readers a month, so nobody digs deep on the Nile; a mid-sized river almost nobody reads about pays out far more. Every place in the bank carries the median of sixty days of view counts, so one news cycle can’t make a place look famous for good.
What counts as a jackpot?
An answer at 85% obscurity or more within its category - “one in Wormillion”. Every jackpot digs the same distance and pays almost the maximum; only the single most obscure place in a category pays the full 1,500 and digs 150.
What happens on a misspelling?
It is corrected, not rejected. Type “Kilimanjro” and you get Kilimanjaro, with the real spelling shown. Short names get no slack, and if two different places are equally close the answer is refused rather than guessed. “Everest” finds Mount Everest, “Harbour” finds Harbor.
Do wrong answers cost anything?
No. An unrecognised answer, a place from the wrong category or one outside the prompt’s scope costs nothing but time - the game tells you why and you keep guessing. A place in another category gets a nudge (“Auckland is a non-capital city; this round wants a capital city”).
What is the difference between Today’s dig and Endless?
Today’s dig is the same ten prompts for everyone that day, once a day, turning over at midnight on your clock - the one to compare with friends, with a share grid, a streak and a comparison against everyone else who dug that day. Endless is a fresh draw as often as you like. Nothing else differs.
What do the prompts look like?
The first two rounds are plain: “Name a river.” After that most rounds carry a condition - a region (“Name a country in Southeast Asia”), a theme (“Name a river in Mesopotamia”, “Name a volcano”), an ocean, a flag colour (“Name a country whose flag has green in it”), a size (“Name a lake smaller than 100 km²”) or a letter (“Name a river with a T in it”). A condition narrows what is accepted; scoring is always against the whole category.
What is Skip?
A button under the answer row that gives the round up at once. It costs exactly what letting the clock run out costs: no points, no dig.
Where do the places come from?
Every entry is a real place with its own English Wikipedia article, gathered country by country from Wikipedia’s own lists and category trees. Nothing is invented. The bank currently holds about fifteen thousand places across nine categories, and it grows.
How deep can a dig go?
The strata are Topsoil, Subsoil, Clay, Bedrock, Deep Rock, Mantle and Core. A run of median answers ends around the Mantle; ten perfect answers reach 1,500 - the Core starts at 600, so a strong run gets there without being perfect.