Hivemind: the daily game where you guess what everyone else said

01  What it is

Hivemind is a free daily game with ten questions and no correct answers. Each question is an opinion — the most overrated thing to put in a sandwich, the most annoying thing a restaurant menu can do to you — and you get five possible answers, occasionally six. You are not asked which one you believe. You are asked which one you think most other people picked.

Everybody in the world gets the same ten questions on the same day, and the set turns over at midnight UTC. There is no archive and no backfill, so yesterday is genuinely gone. The 118 questions in rotation come back around instead, on a fixed ring with no question repeating inside a nine-day window — which concentrates answers onto each question rather than spreading them thin across a calendar.

That shape makes this a different kind of daily from a word game or a quiz. There is nothing here you can study for. Somebody who has never heard of any of the general knowledge in a trivia app can still score 100, because the only fact in play is what other people are like.

02  The skill it actually tests

Guessing the popular answer sounds like a party trick until you try it, because it asks you to hold two opinions at once: yours, and the one you believe a stranger would give. Those two are frequently not the same, and the distance between them is the interesting part of the game.

The failure mode is never ignorance. It is taste. Faced with the most overrated sandwich filling, the tempting move is to answer with the ingredient you personally find overrated, and to answer with a flourish, because a clever answer feels like a correct one. Crowds are not clever. They are fast and they are ordinary: the answer that reaches your head first is usually the answer that reached most heads, and the interesting option you had to reach for is the one almost nobody took.

The game rewards one learnable habit — answer as the average person, not as yourself — and then makes it hard in a way that is not obvious from outside, because crowds are not consistent either. They lean towards the plain option on food, the cynical one on work, and on some questions the funny answer turns out to be the popular one anyway. Ten questions is short enough to take again tomorrow and long enough to be humbling.

03  How a run goes

One button starts it and the first question arrives. There is no timer, no hint, no undo and no skipping: the moment you tap an answer it locks, and the tap you made is the tap you live with. Ten questions at fifteen or twenty seconds each is a run of about three minutes, which is exactly the size of a queue or a bus ride.

Then the reveal, which is the moment the whole app is built around. Fifty small hexagons gather on your choice and split, migrating across the answer cells until they settle into the shape of the hive — one dot for roughly every two percent — with your pick marked and the crowd favourite tagged. A line underneath says what happened in plain words: that the hive picked your answer and so did you, or that it leaned somewhere else and how far.

After the tenth reveal the Hive Sync number counts up and the verdict lands as a single card: the number, the archetype word, a ten-cell strip of the run, and one line of texture — Nailed it, with the question you read closest, or Whiffed it, when a miss was big enough to be funny. That same composition is what the share button sends to a group chat, and what you can save as a 2x PNG. Display ads sit below the fold on the landing screen, under the verdict card and on the question pages; nothing interrupts the ten questions themselves.

04  How the score works

Every question scores the share of the hive standing where you stood, divided by the share standing on the most popular answer. Name the top answer and the question is worth a full point. Pick the 34% option when the winner took 38% and it scores about 0.89, because you very nearly had it — which is why the scoring is proportional instead of right-or-wrong. Your Hive Sync is the average of the ten, rounded, so 100 means you called the crowd on every single question.

The result lands in one of three bands: In Tune (78 to 100), Contrarian (55 to 77) and Out of Touch (0 to 54). Out of Touch is the funniest card to get, and the app says so kindly. The band is derived from the number every time it is displayed rather than stored beside it, so the word on your card can never disagree with the score printed next to it.

There is no global leaderboard and no percentile to check yourself against — the only comparison the game makes is between your answer and everyone else's on the same ten questions.

05  Where the numbers come from

Most games in this genre would rather not explain this, so it is worth saying plainly: the split you see on a reveal is not a raw count of players. Every question starts from a seeded baseline of four hundred editorial estimates, and real answers are blended into it as they arrive. That is what stops day one from being an empty room or a nonsense 100% split, and the seed fades as the crowd grows — past roughly a thousand real answers it carries under a third of the weight, and it is never topped up.

The app labels that seam instead of hiding it. The blended figure is called the hive, and while real answers are still at or below four hundred the footer under every reveal says so in as many words. Anywhere a number is described as answers or players, it is real votes only — and a run being driven by a robot is refused outright rather than counted.

The public question pages hold an even stricter line. A page at /q/<slug> publishes a split only once that question has fifty real answers, and what it publishes then is the live split with the real count attached — never the blend. Browse the index and most of them still say, honestly, that the numbers would move too much to mean anything yet.

Nothing is stored about you: no account, no login, no name. The only things the game remembers are today's verdict and your streak, both in your own browser on your own device, and one run counts per day so a refresh does not tally twice.

06  Questions people ask

Is Hivemind free, and do I need an account?

It is free and there is no account. The game is ad-supported, runs in your browser on a phone or a desktop, and asks for nothing but taps — there is no text input anywhere in it, nothing to install and nothing to download.

Do I need to know trivia to play?

No, and that is the point. Every question is an opinion with no correct answer, so there are no facts to know. A player who is bad at quizzes can score 100 by judging people well, and a player who is good at quizzes can score badly by answering honestly.

What time does Hivemind reset?

At midnight UTC, when a new set of ten questions unlocks for everybody at once. The verdict screen counts down to it. There is no archive and no backfill, so a day you miss is a day you cannot go back and play.

What counts as a good Hive Sync score?

The bands are In Tune (78-100), Contrarian (55-77) and Out of Touch (0-54). A perfect 100 means you named the crowd's most popular answer on all ten questions, which is genuinely hard. Because scoring is proportional, a run of near misses still scores respectably rather than reading as failure.

Are the answers from real people, or are they made up?

Both, and the app tells you which. Each question starts with a seeded baseline of four hundred editorial estimates, and real answers are blended in as they arrive. While real answers are at or below four hundred, the footer under the reveal names the baseline. The public question pages only publish numbers once fifty real answers exist, and then only the real split.

Does everyone get the same questions?

Yes. The ten are computed from the UTC date alone, so the same questions go out worldwide on the same day. The 118-question bank is served on a fixed rotation with no repeats inside nine days, so each question collects answers instead of being shown once and retired.

07  More from the shelf

• Baloney — Three facts. One's fake. Sniff it out.
• Isobath — Drop a pin. Find out how wrong you were.
• Dewkeep — Keep a creature. Grow a little world.
• Tilewright — Draw seven tiles. Outword the AI.

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