The Noillirk guide to thinking like everyone else
What is the Noillirk game?
Noillirk is a survey game you play alone. A prompt names a category, you type one answer, and the game scores it by how many people it expects would have said the same thing. The prompt "name something people put on a hot dog" has dozens of correct answers. Pineapple is correct. Kimchi is correct. In Noillirk neither of them is worth much, because the board behind the prompt is a ranking of what ordinary people say, and ordinary people say ketchup.
That single twist changes what the game asks of you. A trivia quiz rewards knowing more than other people. Noillirk rewards knowing what other people know. The skill is closer to reading a room than to reading an encyclopedia: you are trying to predict the first word that pops into a hundred strangers' heads, and then type it before 15 seconds run out.
The structure is simple. A Noillirk climb has seven prompts. Each answer lands in one of six tiers, from Only you at 4 points to Top answer at 100, and every point lifts your krill 10 climb units into the sky. A perfect climb of seven Top answers reaches 16.3 km. The Daily gives everyone the same seven prompts, the Classic climb deals fresh ones whenever you like, and Endless keeps going until your three balloons pop.
Why is it called Noillirk?
Read it backwards. Noillirk is Krillion reversed, and the game is Krillion reversed too. Krillion is a daily game in which rare answers sink your krill deeper into the ocean and obvious answers barely count. Its tagline is "one in a krillion". Noillirk keeps the krill and the format but flips the incentive: now the obvious answer is the prize, and the rare one barely counts.
The mirror runs through the picture as well. Where Krillion goes down through the water toward the trench, Noillirk goes up. Your krill hangs from three balloons in a town park, and every point lifts it higher: over the rooftops, past the tallest towers, through the cloud base, alongside the airliners, into the ozone layer and, if you keep going in Endless, beyond the Kármán line into space.
The name was already in use by late September 2026 as a companion to Krillion. This page runs our own Noillirk: the original rules for timing, tiers and points, with our own prompts, our own boards and our own sky.
Where guess-the-most-common-answer games come from
Noillirk is new, but the question it asks is old. Economists, psychologists and television producers have all spent decades asking what most people would say.
1936: the beauty contest
In The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes compared investing to a newspaper contest in which readers picked the prettiest faces from a set of photographs, and the winners were those whose picks matched the most popular choices. The trick, Keynes noted, was not to choose the face you liked but the face you expected everyone else to like. That is a Noillirk prompt in a three-piece suit.
1960: focal points
The economist Thomas Schelling asked groups of people to solve coordination puzzles without talking to each other, such as where to meet a stranger in New York with no time or place agreed. Most converged on the same answers. Schelling called these shared defaults focal points: choices that stand out because everyone expects everyone else to see them too. Every Top answer on a Noillirk board is a focal point.
1969: counting the first answers
William Battig and William Montague asked hundreds of American students to list as many members of 56 categories as they could in 30 seconds each, then published how often every answer appeared. Their tables, and the 2004 update by Van Overschelde, Rawson and Dunlosky that expanded them to 70 categories, became standard tools in memory research. They are, in effect, real Noillirk boards collected with pencils and stopwatches.
1976: a hundred people surveyed
Family Feud premiered on ABC in July 1976. Its questions had been put to a hundred people in advance, and contestants scored by matching the survey's answers, with the top answer worth the most. The British version, Family Fortunes, followed in 1980. Noillirk borrows the same idea of a prepared survey and a top answer, then strips away the studio, the families and the buzzers so that you can play it alone in 15 seconds a prompt.
What real surveys say about the #1 answer
How often does the crowd actually agree? The best public evidence comes from category norms. In one recent set, Kantner and Lindsay asked undergraduates at the University of Victoria in Canada to write down the first four members of 57 categories that came to mind, with around 130 to 170 students answering each category, and to avoid "fancy" or odd answers. That instruction is almost word for word the strategy for Noillirk. Their published spreadsheet records, for every answer, the share of students who wrote it first and the share who wrote it at all. About 40 Noillirk boards are built directly from it, and the numbers below come from the same file.
| Category | #1 answer | Said it first | Said it at all | Next on the list |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fruit | apple | 67% | 88% | orange, banana, pear, strawberry |
| Four-footed animal | dog | 54% | 88% | cat, horse, deer, bear |
| Item of furniture | chair | 50% | 87% | couch, table, bed, desk |
| Vegetable | carrot | 47% | 71% | celery, tomato, broccoli, cucumber |
| Precious stone | diamond | 43% | 89% | ruby, emerald, sapphire, jade |
| Colour | blue | 41% | 91% | red, green, yellow, purple |
| Flower | rose | 35% | 86% | daisy, tulip, lily, sunflower |
| Sport | soccer | 35% | 72% | basketball, hockey, football, baseball |
| Insect | ant | 23% | 54% | spider, fly, bee, beetle |
| Musical instrument | piano | 22% | 66% | guitar, flute, trumpet, drums |
| Bird | robin | 19% | 44% | crow, blue jay, seagull, eagle |
The #1 answer is rarely a landslide
Across all 57 categories, the median share of people who gave the #1 answer first was 36%. Only 12 categories had a #1 answer that more than half the group said first. In most categories the top answer wins a plurality, not a majority, which is exactly why a Noillirk board still pays 64 points for second, third and fourth place. Close enough is usually worth a lot.
When one answer runs away with it
Some categories have a clear prototype. Two thirds of the students named apple first for fruit, and 88% named it somewhere in their four. Hammer did almost as well for a carpenter's tool, with 71% naming it first. When a Noillirk prompt feels like it has one obvious answer, it usually does, and hesitating only burns the clock.
When the field is split
Other categories are a scrum. For musical instrument, piano and guitar were each named first by about a fifth of the students and each listed by 66%. For bird, robin topped the ranking with only 19% saying it first. These are the Noillirk prompts where the reveal surprises people, and where a Top four answer for 64 points is a perfectly good outcome.
First thought versus any thought
In eight of the 57 categories, the answer that ranked #1 overall was not the answer the most people said first. Iron was named first more often than steel for metal, and noun more often than verb for part of speech, yet the other answer edged ahead once second, third and fourth mentions were counted. The word that leaps out first is a strong Noillirk guess but not a guaranteed one.
The crowd decides the board
The same table shows how much the board depends on who is asked. For country, 82% of the Victoria students wrote Canada first. The authors point out that Canadian and American terms differ for common items, "pop" against "soda", and that the #1 answer differs from the American norms for many categories; in sport, the Victoria students put soccer first and hockey third. Noillirk keeps those survey boards as published, and its estimated boards aim at a general, mostly English-speaking adult crowd, so answer for that crowd rather than for your own town.
Why so many people give the same answer
The clustering in those tables is not a coincidence. Three well-studied habits of the mind push a crowd toward the same handful of words.
Every category has a best example
In 1975 Eleanor Rosch showed that people treat some members of a category as better examples than others. Robins are better birds than penguins, chairs are better furniture than lamps. Rosch asked hundreds of students to rate how good an example each member of a category was, and the ratings agreed strongly from person to person. The best examples, later called prototypes, are also the answers that appear earliest and most often in category norms, which is why they fill the top of a Noillirk board.
What comes to mind first feels most common
Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman described the availability heuristic in 1973: people judge how frequent something is by how easily examples come to mind. When you read a Noillirk prompt, the answer that arrives first is the most available one in your memory, and because most people share the same everyday exposure to food, animals and places, it is usually the most available one in theirs too.
Strangers coordinate on the obvious
Schelling's focal points explain the last step. Even without communicating, people tend to pick the choice that seems most obvious to everyone. In Noillirk you are not trying to name your favourite answer. You are trying to name the one everyone would expect everyone to name, and that extra layer of reasoning tends to land on the same few words.
How Noillirk scoring works
Every accepted answer scores, and every point lifts the krill. What an answer scores depends only on where it sits for that prompt.
| Tier | Where the answer sits | Points |
|---|---|---|
| Top answer | #1 on the board | 100 |
| Top four | #2 to #4 | 64 |
| On the board | #5 to #9 | 32 |
| Some said it | off the board, a fair number say it | 16 |
| Few said it | off the board, a handful say it | 8 |
| Only you | off the board, almost nobody says it | 4 |
| Miss | pass or timeout | 0 |
The tiers double as you go up, so one Top answer is worth more than three On the board answers. A Classic climb or Daily is seven prompts, which makes 700 points the maximum. Every point lifts the krill 10 climb units, and a table of real altitudes turns units into height: early points move you metres, later points move you kilometres. One Top answer takes you to 45 metres, level with the skyline. 300 points reaches about 2,800 metres among the mountain peaks, 600 points about 10.7 km where airliners cruise, and a perfect 700 reaches 16.3 km in the ozone layer.
In Endless the climb carries on past 700. At 1,250 points you reach the Kármán line region and at 1,500 you are 100 km up, the conventional edge of space. The table continues past the space station, the Moon and the planets, all at real distances from Earth, out to the edge of the solar wind about 120 times as far from the Sun as Earth is.
Daily, Classic and Endless
The Noillirk Daily is seven prompts, the same for everyone on the same day, and a new set starts at midnight UTC. Each Daily is numbered. You get one go: if you leave halfway, the next visit resumes where you stopped, and once it is finished the menu counts down to the next one and lets you review today's answers.
The Classic climb is Noillirk Unlimited in practice. It deals seven prompts from the whole bank every time you press start, avoiding the prompts you met recently, and there is no limit on how many climbs you play. Your best Classic altitude is kept on your device.
Endless deals one prompt at a time and only stops when your three balloons are gone. Only a miss pops a balloon, so any accepted answer, even an Only you, keeps you in the air. A Top answer wins a popped balloon back, up to three. The best Endless altitude is kept separately.
After a Daily or Classic climb, the results list every prompt with your answer and its points. Open a prompt to see every answer Noillirk accepts for it, grouped by tier, and whether its board comes from published survey data or from our estimate. The share text shows your altitude and one coloured square per prompt, but none of your answers, so it is safe to post before your friends have played.
How to find the most common answer in 15 seconds
Fifteen seconds is long enough to think once and short enough to panic. A routine helps.
Say the category's best example in your head
Read the prompt and ask: if a child had to give one example, what would it be? Fruit is apple, animal is dog, colour is blue. The child test cuts through expertise, which is the main thing standing between a knowledgeable player and the Top answer.
Use the general word, not the specific one
Surveys collect broad words. Shoes beats sneakers, car beats sedan, rose beats a named variety. In the category data above, a brand did show up for type of vehicle, Honda at #6, but behind car, truck, van, SUV and bus. The more specific your answer, the further down the board it usually sits.
Picture the crowd, not yourself
If your first thought comes from your job, your hobby or your hometown, stop and swap it for what a random adult would say. A birdwatcher's first bird is not a robin, but the crowd's is.
When two answers feel tied, pick the plainer word
The category tables show how often the top two are close: piano and guitar, chair and couch, ant and spider. When you cannot separate two answers, pick the shorter, plainer, more frequently used word. Both are likely to be in the top four anyway, and 64 points is a good result.
Never let the clock win
Any accepted answer scores at least 4 points, and a refused answer costs only time. If you are stuck with five seconds left, type anything correct. In Endless this matters twice over: a timeout pops a balloon, while even an Only you answer keeps all three.
Mistakes that cost Noillirk points
Most low climbs come from the same few habits.
Being too clever. The interesting answer is the one fewer people give. If you feel proud of an answer, it is probably off the board.
Being too specific. Varieties, brands and technical names sit lower on the board than the everyday word for the same thing.
Answering for your own crowd. Local favourites, national sports and regional foods can be #1 where you live and nowhere near the top of a general board.
Misspelling short answers. Noillirk forgives one typo only in answers of five letters or more. Three- and four-letter answers have to be exact, so slow down for words like ant, fig or oak.
Passing in Endless. A pass is a miss, and a miss pops a balloon. Type the safest obvious answer instead.
Noillirk vs Krillion
The two games ask the same kind of question and pay for opposite answers. In Krillion you hunt for the correct answer nobody else will think of; the obvious answer barely moves your krill. In Noillirk you hunt for the answer everybody will think of; the obscure answer barely lifts it.
That makes them good training partners. Playing Krillion teaches you the full spread of a category, every odd corner of it. Playing Noillirk teaches you its centre of gravity. The instinct that wins one round of Noillirk loses the next round of Krillion, and switching between them is a quick way to notice how predictable your own first thoughts are.
If you enjoy the estimation side of these games, try the Fermi game, where you guess huge unknown numbers and are scored by how close you land. If you prefer memory, the Color Game shows you a colour for a few seconds and asks you to rebuild it from memory. And for a visual guessing game, Size It Up asks you to scale a silhouette to its real size.
