How to play Noillirk
Noillirk rewards the answer nobody else gives. You get seven prompts a day; every correct answer lifts your balloon, and the rarer it is, the bigger the lift. A perfect climb reaches low Earth orbit, 700 km above the ground.
The short version
- Seven prompts. Each one is open-ended: "Name a bird", "Name a country in Africa", "Name a kitchen tool".
- 25 seconds each. Type one answer and press GO. When the clock hits zero, whatever is in the box is checked.
- Three tries. If an answer is not accepted, the box shakes and you can try again while time remains.
- Rarer is higher. Common answers earn 10 points; the rarest earn 100. One point is one kilometre.
How answers are scored
Every prompt comes with an answer sheet: a long list of valid answers, ranked by how often people actually give them. The very top of the list, the answers almost everyone reaches for first, scores the least. Further down the list the air gets thinner and the points climb.
| Tier | Points | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Shooting Star | 100 | One or two hand-picked prize answers per prompt, each with a fun fact. Rarely found. |
| Thin Air | 85 | Valid answers that very few players give, including correct answers missing from the sheet. |
| High Flyer | 60 | Uncommon answers that still come to mind with a little thought. |
| Flock | 30 | Solid, popular answers. Plenty of people share them. |
| Overthought | 15 | The answer that feels original but is everyone's backup plan. |
| Pigeon | 10 | The first answers that pop into nearly every head. |
| Not accepted | 0 | Wrong, off-topic, or breaks a letter rule in the prompt. |
A worked example
Prompt: Name a bird.
Typing Eagle or Robin earns 10 points: those are the Pigeons. Penguin is a Flock answer at 30. Toucan is a High Flyer at 60, Bittern reaches Thin Air at 85, and the Shoebill, a giant African stork with a clog-shaped bill, is a Shooting Star worth the full 100.
The trap is Kakapo. It sounds obscure, so it is the answer many quiz fans save for this moment, and it lands in Overthought for 15.
Answers that are not on the sheet
No list is complete. When you type something the sheet does not contain, an automatic referee checks whether it really answers the prompt. If it does, it counts as Thin Air: 85 points, because almost nobody else gave it. If it does not, it is not accepted and you may try again.
- Spelling. Small typos are forgiven when the intended answer is clear, and the verdict shows the correct spelling.
- Letter rules. Prompts like "Name an animal that starts with P" are checked strictly. A brilliant answer that starts with the wrong letter scores nothing.
- Duplicates. Plurals, "the", accents and capital letters are ignored, so "The Beatles" and "beatles" are the same answer.
Altitude and the layers of the sky
Your total score is your altitude. The scale is real, so a climb takes you through the actual layers of Earth's atmosphere:
- 0–12 kmTroposphere. Clouds, weather and the top of Mount Everest at 8.8 km.
- 12–50 kmStratosphere. Calm air, the ozone layer and the record skydive from 39 km.
- 50–85 kmMesosphere. The coldest layer. Most meteors burn up here.
- 85–600 kmThermosphere. Past the Kármán line at 100 km, through the auroras, to the Space Station at about 400 km.
- 600–700 kmExosphere and low Earth orbit. Only a near-perfect climb gets here.
Daily climb, Unlimited and past climbs
The daily climb is the same seven prompts for everyone. It starts at midnight New York time, you get one go, and finishing it keeps your streak alive. Unlimited deals a fresh random set of seven whenever you want, with a link you can send to a friend so you both get the same prompts; it never touches your streak. Missed a day? Choose "Replay a day" in the menu, or browse the answers in the archive of past climbs.
Craft to unlock
You start with the Red Balloon and the Paper Plane. More craft unlock as you play, and you can switch between them in Settings:
- Zeppelin: finish 3 daily climbs.
- Weather Probe: reach 200 km in any climb.
- Star Capsule: keep a 5-day daily streak.
- Night Rocket: reach 400 km in a daily climb.
Tips for a higher climb
- Skip your first thought. If it arrived instantly, it arrived for everyone. Use the extra seconds to go one step further.
- Think in subsets. For "Name a fruit", think tropical, then Southeast Asian: rambutan beats banana by a mile.
- Beware the famous oddity. The well-known weird answer (the platypus, the kakapo, Liechtenstein) is often Overthought.
- Be sure before you gamble. A wrong answer earns 0, and you only have three tries. A safe Flock answer beats an empty round.
- Read the sheets afterwards. Every climb ends with the full answer lists. They are the fastest way to learn what counts as rare.