About The Line

The Line is a daily quiz with a single, deliberately awkward twist: you are never asked which answer is right. You are asked where the truth stops and the lies begin.

Every day there is one question and ten possible answers. Some of them are genuine facts. The rest are complete fiction, written by our resident fibber, Lionel T. Line. The answers are stacked in a single column, and somewhere in that column there is a boundary: everything above it is true, everything below it is invented. Your job is to draw the line in exactly the right place — and you have thirty seconds to do it.

How to play

1. Read the question at the top of the board, then read all ten answers before you touch anything. The fuse starts burning as soon as the puzzle opens.
2. Press and hold the Drag & Release button and slide it up or down the column. A horizontal line follows your finger, sitting between two answers.
3. Release the line at the point where you believe the true answers end and the invented ones start. If you think every answer is a lie, drop the line above the first one. If you think they are all true, drop it below the last.
4. The moment you release, the round is locked, the answers are revealed in green and red, and Lionel offers his opinion of your reasoning. He is rarely generous.

You can also play with the keyboard: use the arrow keys to move the line, Home and End to jump to either extreme, and Enter or Space to lock it in.

Scoring

A perfect line — placed exactly on the boundary — scores zero penalty, which is the best score you can get. Every answer you are out by costs ten points, so being one answer out scores minus ten, two answers out scores minus twenty, and so on. Being wildly out is survivable; being wildly out twice in a week is character-building.

Speed matters too, but only when you are exactly right. If you place a perfect line, every second still left on the fuse is added to your score as a bonus. A perfect line drawn in five seconds is worth far more than a perfect line drawn in twenty-nine, which is why reading the answers quickly is a skill in itself.

The bonus round

On days when a perfect line is achieved, a short bonus question may appear. It works the same way — a second line, a second decision — and any points you earn there are added to your daily total. Some bonus rounds come with a short explanation afterwards so you can see where the trick was hidden.

The leaderboard

Signing in is optional, but it unlocks the parts of the game that involve other people. Your daily score is saved to the leaderboard, you can compare your running total over a week, a month or all time, and you can challenge a friend by sending them a link to the same puzzle you just played. Scores are calculated on our server from where you actually placed the line, so the table stays honest.

Who is Lionel T. Line?

Lionel is the narrator, the question-setter and the source of every lie in the game. He writes the fictional answers, comments on your result, and leaves a cryptic clue about tomorrow's puzzle at the bottom of the leaderboard. He has opinions about your performance and very little tact. Treat everything he says as suspect — that is the point.

A new puzzle every day

The puzzle changes at midnight UTC, and there is only ever one live puzzle at a time. The countdown on the leaderboard tells you exactly how long you have to wait for the next one.

Accessibility and settings

The game can be played entirely with a keyboard, sound effects can be turned down or off, and an invert-colours button switches the whole game — Lionel included — to a high-contrast dark view. Settings are remembered in your browser between visits.

Ready to try it? Play today's puzzle.