How Farflung scoring works

In Farflung, being right is only the start. Your score for each prompt depends on how many other players chose the same country, so a rare right answer carries you further than a common one. Five pins add up to an expedition of up to 500 km.

The five tiers

How rarity is measured

For every prompt, Farflung counts which right answers players pin. Each answer's share of those pins is compared with an even split across all the prompt's right answers. An answer picked twice as often as an even split is Common; one picked less than a fifth as often is Farflung. This keeps tiers meaningful whether a prompt has eight right answers or sixty.

Before anyone has played

Every daily prompt is new, so the first players can't be measured against anyone. Until enough pins are in, Farflung starts from an estimate based on how often each country's English Wikipedia article is read: well-known countries are assumed to be common answers. In that early phase the two rarest tiers are merged, so a deep cut always earns the full 100 km. As real pins arrive, they steadily replace the estimate.

The final count

While a day is in progress, tiers are refreshed every few minutes so players a few minutes apart see the same thing. Once the day has ended in every time zone, Farflung makes a final count of every pin. If your answer turned out rarer than it looked when you played, you gain the difference. A final count never takes distance away, and the result you already shared stays as it was.

Late expeditions

You can play any of the last seven expeditions from camp. They are scored with the same tiers, but they don't change the counts for that day, because the answers may already be public by then, and they don't extend your streak.