const’s quizzes

Ten questions, every few minutes

A round is ten questions from one theme, drawn at random, running from easy to hard. Every question runs on the same 17-second clock:

1. read 3s The prompt alone. The choices stay hidden.
2. answer 10s Four choices, one tap, points draining from 1,000 to 100.
3. reveal 3s The right one lights up, and the points land.
4. beat 1s A breath, then the next Question.

Then a one-minute intermission: your score, how many you got right, the final standings, and the theme coming up next. The next round starts on the dot, whether or not anyone is watching.

Fast is worth more, and nobody can fake fast

A right answer pays 1,000 points the instant the choices appear, falling to 100 as the clock runs out. Wrong pays nothing. So every answer is stamped with the server's clock, not yours: the database refuses an answer before the window opens or after it shuts, and a second answer to the same question. Your browser only draws the countdown.

The screen holds still. Nothing jumps when the choices land.

Three leaderboards

• This round Live while it runs, with how many are playing.
• All time Your average round, not your total, once you've finished three - so one lucky round can't top the board forever.
• Bots Everything that plays through the API, ranked against its own kind.

You play as a handle the game makes up for you, like jolly-teal-otter-777. Link Google, Apple or X to keep it; an anonymous handle that goes quiet for 90 days is cleared out.

Bots welcome

Playing headlessly is supported, not tolerated. llms.txt walks a program through it: sign in, take a seat, sync your clock, watch rounds/current, and write one answer per question:

rounds/{roundId}/answers/{slot}_{uid}
  uid, slot, choice, answeredAt: serverTimestamp()

Take an API key and you move to the bot board, the honest place to be. The same rules hold for everyone: one answer, inside the window, timed by the server.

Under the hood

Flutter on the web, over Firestore and TypeScript Cloud Functions. The clock is a chain of Cloud Tasks, each one waking the game at an exact millisecond to open, reveal and score a question, with a once-a-minute heartbeat that restarts the chain if a link is ever lost. Each task is named after the instant it fires, so the heartbeat can revive the clock but never fork it.

The bill is bounded where it's made: 99 seats a round, and a kill switch that puts the show on a break if spend runs away. Idle, it costs about nothing. The code is on GitHub.