There will be three rounds, as well as an initial practice round.
Each round, pick the required number of cells on the grid.
Cell score is value / sqrt(k), where k is how many players picked that cell.
Popular cells pay less, so unique picks are usually worth more.
You can buy contracts as side bets on how the round will play out. You always pay the cost, and if you win, you receive the win amount as well. For example, if a contract costs 4 and the win is 10, you pay 4 regardless; if you win, you receive 10, for a net gain of +6. If you lose, your net is −4.
You can resubmit picks until the host ends the round. Resubmitting clears your contracts. Use "Restore Previous" to revert to your last submitted picks and contracts.
If you do not submit picks before the round ends, you receive a normalized score of 0 for both components and are ranked last for that round.
Some contracts (e.g. Least Picked, Most Picked, Lopsided) depend on which cells were picked most or least often. When cells are tied in pick count, ties for most-picked are broken by grid position — earliest cell wins (first by row, then by column). So if all cells have equal picks, the "most-picked" cell is (0, 0). Ties for least-picked are broken the opposite way — latest cell wins. So if all cells have equal picks, the "least-picked" cell is (3, 3).
The Crowd: — the payout is dynamic: you receive 1 point for every player who bought this contract. With a cost of 40, you profit if 41+ players buy it.
High Variance: — standard deviation measures how spread out the pick counts are across all grid cells (unpicked cells count as 0). A value above 10 means players concentrated heavily on certain cells.
Bargain Hunter: "value" refers to the number shown on the grid cell, not the scored value after dividing by popularity.
Top 20% / Underdog: based on board score only (pre-contract). Players are ranked by board score; ties share the higher rank — e.g. two players tied for 3rd are both ranked 3rd, not 4th. If 5 players have board score ranks 1–5 with no ties, Underdog would win for ranks 4 and 5. If board score ranks are 1, 2, 3, 3, 5, Underdog would win only for rank 5. If 10 players have board score ranks 1, 2, 2, 4, …, 10, Top 20% would win for the highest-ranked player and the two tied for rank 2.
Each round, your score is based on two equally weighted components: score from grid picks and profit/loss from contract selection. For the scores from grid picks, we take the raw scores of all players and linearly normalize them to the range [0, 0.5]. Similarly, we take all profits/losses from selecting contracts, and linearly normalize these to [0, 0.5]. Your round score is the sum of these two scaled scores (ranging from 0 to 1).
As an example, if a player scores 3 from their grid picks, the minimum score across all players from grid picks is 1, and the maximum is 11, then their normalized grid score is (3 - 1) / (11 - 1) × 0.5 = 0.1. If their profit is 25 from contracts, the minimum is -5, and the maximum is 45, then their normalized contract score is (25 - (-5)) / (45 - (-5)) × 0.5 = 0.3. So, their round score is 0.1 + 0.3 = 0.4.
Your game score is the average of your round scores across all three scoring rounds. The player with the highest game score wins.