BrainRank: ten shared questions a day, and a rank that means something

01  What BrainRank is

BrainRank is a free daily general-knowledge quiz you play in a browser. Each day brings one set of ten multiple-choice questions, and that set is shared: on any given UTC day, everyone who opens the page gets the same ten, in the same order. A fresh set unlocks at midnight UTC, and the set is worked out from the date itself, so it does not matter whether you play at 00:05 or at 23:55 — you get the same questions the rest of the world got.

A round takes a few minutes. Each question has four options and a timer ring of roughly fifteen seconds; tap an answer, or press the matching number key, and you get an instant right-or-wrong flash before the game moves on by itself. Run the clock out and the question counts as a miss and the answer is shown. There is no going back and no changing an answer once it is in.

When the tenth question resolves you get a score out of ten, your live standing among everyone who has played that day, a bell curve with your position marked on it, and your current streak. That is the whole product: no account, no download, no lobby to wait in.

The question bank holds 330 questions across nine areas — geography, science, history, nature, maths, language, arts, everyday science, and the myths and legends of the ancient world — and it grows as new packs are added.

02  One shared set, one attempt

You get a single attempt at the day. Once you have played, opening the page again shows the result you already earned, with a countdown to the next set, rather than a fresh round. That constraint is not stinginess — it is what makes the number on the card worth anything. Nobody in the standings is on their fifth run at the same questions.

The streak works the same way. Play on consecutive UTC days and it climbs; miss a day and it starts again at one. If you played today or yesterday, the landing screen shows the streak before you start, which is a small thing that turns out to be the main reason to come back.

Your streak and your saved result live in your own browser, on your own device. Nothing about them is sent anywhere, and the honest flip side is that they do not follow you to a second device or a different browser, and clearing your browsing data clears them.

03  Where that rank actually comes from

When you finish, your score is added to one anonymous counter for the day — a tally with eleven buckets in it, one for each possible score from zero to ten. No names, no per-player records, no profile. The only thing that leaves your browser is the number you scored. Those daily counters are discarded after about two months, so the record stays a scoreboard rather than an archive of players.

You are then told the share of today's players you scored at or above. The card leads with the complement of that figure, because "you beat 82% of players" reads better as "Top 18% today". The bell curve underneath is drawn from the real bucket counts for that day, not a stock illustration, and your marker is planted on the score you actually got.

There is one case where BrainRank refuses to give you a percentile. Early in the day, before twenty people have played, the crowd is too thin for the number to mean anything, so instead of inventing one you get your plain position — "#7 of 30 so far — check back tonight". No fabricated curve, no fake rival. It is a deliberate choice and it is the most obviously honest thing in the app.

If the scoreboard cannot be reached at all, the result degrades to a score-and-streak card with a retry button. The reveal never depends on the network; a score of eight is still a score of eight.

04  Fifteen seconds a question changes what kind of game it is

Most online quizzes are lookup puzzles — you have as long as you like to dredge the answer up. BrainRank is recall under a clock, and the clock is per question: each one gets its own full timer, so a hard question does not eat into the next one. The pressure is not on any single answer but on the total. Ten questions at fifteen seconds is two and a half minutes of decisions, and hesitation is the thing that costs you, not ignorance alone.

That is why the game never lets you revise. A committed answer is committed, the correct option is revealed briefly whether you found it or not, and the next question loads. It is closer to a quiz-show buzzer than to a workbook, which is also why playing it daily for a couple of weeks does more for your score than any list of tricks: the timer rewards the questions you know cold and punishes the ones you have to reason through.

Two smaller things worth knowing before you start. The answer tiles are reachable by keyboard, so pressing 1 to 4 works as well as tapping, and correct and wrong are never signalled by colour alone — there is an icon, a label, and a spoken announcement for anyone using a screen reader.

05  The archive is the part most people miss

Every past day is preserved in full at the archive: the exact ten questions the world played that day, the correct answer to each, and a one-line explanation of why. It covers roughly the last month of play on a rolling window, and today's set is deliberately never listed — so you can read yesterday's answers without spoiling the round you have not played yet.

It is a static page, so it arrives as plain readable HTML rather than something that has to boot up first. Practically, it does three jobs: it settles arguments about what the answer actually was, it lets you check a friend's brag against the questions they claim to have faced, and it is the closest thing the game has to a practice surface. Reading a month of explained questions is a better use of ten minutes than replaying a round you cannot replay anyway.

06  What it costs, and how you share a result

BrainRank is free and supported by advertising. There is no paywall, no premium tier, and nothing to buy — the whole game is the ten questions and the card at the end of them.

The card is the shareable part. Your result becomes a link you can send and an image you can download — a wide scoreboard-style card carrying your score, your rank and your streak, at standard size or double resolution if you want it sharp on a phone. Anyone who opens your link sees your card with a single button to play today's ten, which is a cleaner invitation than a screenshot with no context.

And then the honest limit: the card is a brag, not a leaderboard. There are no names to climb past and no profile to build, because the app never learns who you are. Ten questions, one number, tomorrow.

07  Questions people ask

Is BrainRank free, and do I need an account?

It is free and ad-supported, with no account, no login and nothing to install. Open the page, press Play, and you are in today's set. There is no paywall and no in-app purchase.

How is the "Top X%" rank calculated?

Your score goes into one anonymous tally for the day, counting how many players landed on each score from 0 to 10. You are told the share of those players you scored at or above, and the card shows the other side of that figure as "Top X%" — beating 82% of players is Top 18%. Early in the day, before twenty people have played, there is no percentile at all: you get your plain position instead, like "#7 of 30 so far", rather than an invented rank.

Can I play more than once a day?

No. One shared set of ten questions, one attempt. After you have played, the page shows the result you earned and a countdown to the next set, which unlocks at 00:00 UTC. That single-shot format is what makes the daily rank and the streak comparable between players.

What happens to my streak if I miss a day?

It resets to day one. The streak counts consecutive UTC days played, so a missed day ends the run and the next play starts a new one. Your streak is stored in your own browser, which means it does not transfer to another device and clearing your browsing data clears it.

Do the questions repeat?

Not for a long time. The bank is dealt out ten questions a day in a shuffled order, and every question in it is served once before any of them comes back around — at the current size of 330 questions that is a cycle of about 33 days. New packs lengthen the rotation, and they only ever apply from the day they are added forward, so a day that has already been played is never rewritten.

Can I see the answers to a day I missed?

Yes. The archive keeps each past day in full: the ten questions that were served, the correct answer to each, and a short explanation. It covers roughly the last month on a rolling basis, and today's set is never listed there so a round you have not played is never spoiled.

08  More from the shelf

• Hivemind — Don't answer. Guess how everyone else did.
• Baloney — Three facts. One's fake. Sniff it out.
• Gutcheck — How sure are you, really?
• Isobath — Drop a pin. Find out how wrong you were.

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