How to Play Krillocity: One Race Explained, Prompt by Prompt

Krillocity is a free race to name as many answers as you can. Everyone in the race gets the same prompt at the same moment, such as Name a book made into a film, and 30 seconds to type every answer they can think of. Each answer the game accepts swims your krill forward along an underwater track, and the rarer the answer, the further it swims. After seven prompts, whoever has swum furthest wins.

It runs in any browser, on a phone or a computer, with no download and nothing to sign up for. The quickest way to learn it is to watch a race, so this guide follows one from the start screen to the payout, then covers the rules a race does not show you.

• 7 prompts in a public race, each on a 30-second clock, with 2 seconds to read it before the clock starts.
• 16 racers in a public race. A private race seats anywhere from 2 to 16.
• 6 tiers for an accepted answer, worth from 100 m to 1,000 m. Every accepted answer adds to your distance, and your distance is your score.
• About 5 minutes a race, from the first prompt to the results.
• Places pay, not metres: depth tokens for every racer you finish ahead of, and a bonus for the win.

The start screen has two ways in. Start daily is one race a day on the same seven prompts as everyone else, and how the daily works has a guide of its own. Play multiplayer opens the lobby, with the live races:

• Join a room from the list. Public rooms race back to back, so there is no queue and nothing to wait for: you are dealt in on the next prompt and can stay as long as you like.
• Make a private race starts a race only the people you invite can join, with your own choice of racers, prompts and seconds. Everything about it is in our private race walkthrough.

For this guide we made a private race of three prompts for three racers, Coral, Finn and Pip, so every answer could be kept. Its code and an Invite key sit at the top of the racers panel, and the race runs on its own clock. Each prompt opens with the call over the course: 2, 1, GO.

A small judge krill swims the prompt card down from the top of the screen, with the prompt's category over it, and the count-in reads 2, 1. Then the clock starts. Its dial counts down beside the answer box and turns pink for the last 10 seconds. Type an answer and press Enter or Swim: the box clears at once, so the next answer can follow without a tap, and on a phone the keyboard stays up between answers.

Every answer you send shows as a chip in a row under the prompt. It carries a small square while it is with the judge, then the metres it swam in its tier's colour. A chip reads said if you had already counted that answer, no if it was refused, and late if the clock ran out before it was sent. The row keeps your latest six.

Finn went for speed. Jurassic Park, The Godfather and Jaws swam 100 m each, and Fight Club 150 m. Coral typed the same number of titles but reached past the first ones that came to mind: Harry Potter swam 100 m and Dune 150 m, and Holes and The Princess Bride were worth 300 m apiece.

Score those four answers for each racer and Coral earns 850 m, Finn 450 m and Pip 400 m. Coral found two Schooler answers while Finn relied mainly on Plankton.

Every prompt a race deals has a bank of the answers people give to it, usually over a hundred and often several hundred, ranked by how often each one comes up. Where your answer sits in that ranking sets its tier, which determines how far it takes you.

• Plankton, 100 m: the answers nearly everyone gives. Harry Potter, Jaws, Stephen King.
• Too Clever, 150 m: the clever pick that plenty of others thought of too. Dune, Fight Club.
• Schooler, 300 m: well known, but not what comes to mind first. Holes, The Princess Bride.
• Rare, 600 m: an answer few people would reach for.
• Deep Cut, 850 m: true obscurity.
• The top tier, 1,000 m: an answer almost nobody finds. One of these swims as far as ten Plankton answers.

Behind the metres, each tier is a number of points, 10, 15, 30, 60, 85 and 100, and every point swims you 10 m.

Spelling is forgiven, and the chip shows the bank's own spelling: when Coral typed chips for Name a snack in another race, it came back as Crisps. The same answer twice counts once, however it is spelled, and a refused answer costs nothing but the seconds spent typing it.

An answer the bank does not know goes to an AI judge, which checks that it really fits the prompt, and an answer it has accepted before is remembered and counted at once the next time. The judge looks at up to 12 unknown answers from each racer on each prompt, and once 5 of them are refused it stops looking at new ones until the next prompt. Answers the bank knows still count after that, so real obscure answers keep being judged and typing nonsense quickly gets you nowhere.

Word prompts have hundreds of right answers, so they reward volume. Pip's question, education and emotion swam 100 m each, but lotion, a word few people would think of first, swam 300 m and carried Pip past Finn. Finn's fiction made 150 m and action 100 m.

Nothing stops between prompts. TIME! comes up as the clock runs out, and then a board flashes over the course for three seconds: every racer ranked by how far that prompt alone swam them, with every answer each one gave. Two seconds later the judge krill brings the next card down over the last one. A prompt is 36 seconds from the start of its count-in to the start of the next.

The standings beside the track move the whole time, listing every racer with their distance and the gap to you, and the screen calls out each overtake as it happens: You passed Finn, or Coral passed you. A rival who has swum out of view shows as their avatar in a ring at that edge of the screen, with an arrow and the gap in metres.

A race deals its prompts in rising difficulty, so the last is usually the hardest to fill. Coral led going into it, so Finn needed big answers, and found two: dreidel and washing machine swam 150 m each. With 20 seconds left Finn was just ahead. Then Coral's next answer landed, and the line over Finn's lane read Coral passed you.

When the last clock runs out, FINISH! comes up and the judge krill waves a chequered flag. The camera cuts from your krill to the leader, a chequered finish line is drawn across the track just behind them, and the winner is called over the course with a crown on. Answers still with the judge are not lost: one sent before the buzzer counts if its verdict comes back within two and a half seconds.

Then the race's report comes up over a short film of the finish that ends on the winner's victory lap. It shows your place and distance, the top three on a podium, everyone else in order below, and what each place paid. Coral finished first, followed by Finn and Pip.

A race pays places, not metres. In a public race, every racer who scored earns 2,350 depth tokens for each scoring racer they finished ahead of, counting up to eleven, and the winner gets 1,150 more. A private race pays in proportion to its clocks, so this three-prompt race paid 1,000 and 500: Coral beat two racers and won, for 2,500, and Finn beat one, for 1,000. Last place pays nothing, a tie beats nobody, and a racer who scored nothing neither earns nor counts. In a full public race of sixteen:

• 1st: 27,000 tokens, for eleven racers beaten and the win.
• 2nd to 5th: 25,850, for eleven racers beaten.
• 6th: 23,500, and so on, 2,350 less for each place down.
• 16th: nothing.

Tokens go into the purse in the top corner of the start screen, and its Shop key spends them on avatars, which swim the course in place of the plain pink krill, and on emotes for the dock beside the answer box. A private race pays in proportion to how long its clocks run, so no format earns faster than another.

The winner also keeps a crown. It sits on their krill on the course, by their name in the standings and over their spot on the podium, until somebody beats them or they leave the room.

Share on the report copies your result, with your distance and your place. A third place in a full race reads like this:

Krillocity 🦐 multiplayer · 2,480m

3rd of 16 racers

Race me: https://playdailygames.net/krillocity

A winner's share says Won the race instead, with an extra line while they wear the crown. The prompts and the answers are never in it, so it spoils nothing.

The report stands for about 20 seconds, and then the room's next race starts by itself. Everyone stays in, and new racers are dealt in on the next prompt. Private races run back to back the same way.

Leave takes two presses, so a stray tap never ends your race.

The Leaderboard tab in the lobby ranks players by points, added up over every public race: 3 for first, 2 for second and 1 for third, listed from 10 points up. A place counts over at least one other racer who scored, and private races do not count. The lobby shows your own best race beside your name, and signing in with a free Daily account keeps that, your tokens and your avatars on every device you use.

• Can I join a race that is already running? Yes. Any room deals you in on the prompt on screen if at least a fifth of its clock is left, six seconds of a 30-second prompt, and on the next prompt if not.
• How many answers can I send? As many as you can type. Up to three are with the judge at once and the rest wait their turn in the order you typed them, spaced a quarter of a second apart, so typing fast never costs you an answer. A prompt counts up to 40 answers from each racer.
• Is there chat? Yes. On a wide screen the chat sits left of the track and the standings right of it; on a phone both open from keys in a bar over the track. The chat starts empty for everyone who arrives.
• What are the emotes? Short animations of the krill that pop up for everyone in the room. Four are free, the shop sells more, and you can send one every seven seconds.

To swim further next time, start with the tips for naming more answers in 30 seconds. For a tour of the seabed you race along, see the Treasure Run, stretch by stretch. Or line up for a public race now.