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Conundrum Difficulty System - How It Works

We want to cater to players of all standards, which means setting potentially obscure words for experienced players while keeping the game interesting and competitive for newcomers. Here is how conundrums are chosen.

Hardness

Every conundrum is graded for hardness, from 1 (talc - very soft) to 10 (diamond - very hard). This grading is based on the data we've gathered from players' previous attempts to solve them, and we are much indebted to Michael Wallace for the statistical wizardry that produced these numbers. Some conundrums do not have enough data to be graded, so they are temporarily ungraded.

Hardness is how difficult a conundrum is to unscramble, and it is what the Mohs items -- from a piece of talc up to a piece of diamond -- are awarded on. It is not what decides which conundrums you are set: any player can be set a conundrum of any grade.

Obscurity

What varies from player to player is how obscure the answer is allowed to be. Every word in a dictionary is scored for obscurity, from how often it turns up in ordinary writing, whether it is an everyday word dressed up with a prefix or a suffix, and how players have fared with it in games. Each conundrum answer is then ranked against every other conundrum answer of the same length in the same dictionary, from the best known to the most obscure.

A player who has never played a conundrum in a dictionary is set them from the best known half of that dictionary's pool. The more conundrums you play in that dictionary, the more of the pool opens up, until a player who plays a few thousand of them in a year has the whole thing available. Only conundrums played in the last year count, so the door does not close on anybody, but it does mean that going away for a long time will narrow the range again.

Two players share one conundrum, so we use whichever of them has played more conundrums in that dictionary. Within whatever range that gives, every conundrum is equally likely, at any hardness grade. Friendly games always use the newcomer's range; Duels, the gym and the tutorial use the whole pool.

Obscurity has not been computed for every language yet. Where it is missing, the whole pool is available to everybody, exactly as it used to be.

Questions & Answers

Didn't this used to be based on ratings?

It did, and it worked badly. Ratings move around a lot, they mix in letters and numbers skill that has nothing to do with conundrums, they can be pushed downwards on purpose, and in a dictionary with only a handful of rated players everybody came out looking like a beginner. How many conundrums you have actually played is a much more honest measure of how many words you can be expected to know.

Why am I getting Grade 10 conundrums?

Because hardness is no longer capped for anybody. A well-known word can still be scrambled into something brutal, and that is a fair thing to be beaten by; being asked for a word you have never heard of is not. If you solve one, the diamond is yours like anyone else's.

Why let experienced players be exposed to very easy conundrums?

Partly because they will want to practise conundrums from all parts of the spectrum: very easy ones to sharpen their reactions, and very hard ones to extend their knowledge. Partly because we do not want to penalise them too harshly in terms of high scores, max games and so on.

How do I open up the rest of the pool?

Play conundrums. Any rated game counts, and the range widens quickly at first: a few dozen conundrums is already noticeably more than a standing start.