How to Play Krillion: Seven Prompts, 25 Seconds, Six Tiers

What actually happens in a dive?

Seven open prompts, one at a time. Each gives you 25 seconds and accepts a single answer. When the game takes your answer it files it into a rarity tier, tells you which one, and pays you that tier’s points — ten metres of depth per point.

There is no list to pick from and no way to change an answer once it is accepted, which is what makes a dive a test of what you reach for rather than of what you can recognise.

How is each answer graded?

Every prompt has a prepared ladder of answers behind it. The game compares what you typed against that ladder and pays according to how far down it your answer sits:

The full arithmetic — including why the last tier is worth only 15 more than Deep Cut but separates a good dive from a perfect one — is on the tier scores page.

What happens when the game does not recognise my answer?

It says so and gives the clock back to you. Nothing is recorded until an answer is accepted, so a rejected answer costs seconds rather than points: you can retype, respell or switch to a different answer while the timer is still running.

The cost is real anyway. Twenty-five seconds is enough for two attempts if the first one is instant, and not enough for three. The habit worth building is typing the answer you are confident is in the ladder first, then spending the leftover seconds on the answer you actually wanted.

Why does the same word score the same every time?

Because the ladder is prepared per prompt in advance, from an estimate of how familiar each answer is — it is not a running count of what other players typed today. A word’s tier does not move between runs, which is why a walkthrough of a specific prompt is worth anything at all.

This also explains the game’s strangest feeling: a completely correct answer can pay ten. Correctness gets you into the ladder; familiarity decides where on it you land.

What ends a run?

The seventh prompt. There is no fail state and nothing to lose along the way — the run simply accumulates and then reports. A perfect dive is 700 points and 7,000 metres, and seven Safe-schooler answers are 210 points, which is a respectable dive that never touched the interesting part of the ocean.

If you want the part that actually moves your score, start with how to score deeper rather than with more dives. Playing more of the same answers trains the reflex that the ladder is built to punish.

Is this the same game as Noillirk?

No, and the difference is the whole point. Noillirk pays for the answer most people would give, so its ladder runs the other way and its scoring is weighted by question position rather than by a fixed table. Noillirk has the rules; the short version is that the two games reward opposite instincts, and being good at one gives you nothing on the other.