About

What it is

Nine NFL games that all run on the same player data. Three are daily rounds everybody plays together; the rest you can play whenever you like.

BallKnower — daily

One round a day, the same round for everyone, and everyone's score lands on the same board. Five players, five questions each — twenty-five in all. Where they went to college, what round they were drafted, what their numbers look like. Answer all twenty-five correctly and a bonus round opens up.

The shot clock is optional. Leave it on and you get twenty seconds a question, and your run counts towards the leaderboard and your streak. Answering quickly does not earn extra points — the clock is a limit, not a bonus. Turn it off and you can take as long as you like, but the run is casual: it goes in your history and nowhere else. Past days stay playable in the archive, though replays never rank.

Toss the Rock — play anytime

Ride the Bus, the drinking game, except every card is NFL trivia. Six cards down the field: answer right and you advance, answer wrong and you get pushed back. The 50-yard line sits halfway, and crossing it either way is called out. Pick the positions, the difficulty and how obscure the players get before you start.

Built to be passed around a room, so there are no accounts to juggle — signed in, it keeps your games played, games won, and the fewest cards you have ever needed to win.

Deep Bag — daily

One mystery player a day, the same man for everybody. Nine hints, and the first is already showing when you arrive: his position and his college. The rest run down through his draft year, the round he went in and the club that took him, two career numbers, how long he stayed at the team he spent longest with, and finally his initials and his first name.

You start at 100. Every hint you open costs ten, and every wrong guess costs twice the number of hints on screen — so a miss is cheap at the start and dear at the end, and the two prices cross at five hints. Seven guesses for the day. Naming him off the opening hint with nothing spent is a perfect 100, and a solve never scores less than 1.

Over Under — play anytime

Two players and one career number — passing yards, sacks, receptions, whatever comes up — and you pick who had more. Get it right and the winner stays while a new challenger arrives, so a run builds rather than resetting.

The two get closer together the longer you last: the first pair are far apart and by ten in a row they are within a fraction of each other. One wrong pick ends the run, and your score is how far you got.

Career Path — play anytime

A career read one stop at a time. You start with the team a player came into the league with and how long he stayed, and every further stop you ask for costs you score — down through the trades and the free-agent moves and, for some of them, the return to a club they had already left.

When the path runs out it keeps going with his position, the year he was drafted, where he went to college and his initial, so a two-team career is still a game. Name him off the first stop alone and it is worth 10,000. Guessing is free but a wrong one costs you, and it costs more the more of the career is showing.

Statline — play anytime

One real season, laid out as the numbers it was: the games, the yards, the touchdowns. The year is on screen with it, because without the year most stat lines describe a dozen players rather than one. Six names underneath, and one of them had that season.

The wrong names are never accidental — they play the same position in the same era, and anyone who had a season near enough to be a fair second answer is left off. The players get less famous the longer you last. One wrong pick ends the run, and your score is how far you got.

Teammates — new every day

Two players who were never teammates, and you name someone who played with both. Not at the same time and not on the same team — the man who links them usually caught passes from one in one city and the other in another, years apart.

Four pairs a day, the same four for everyone, getting harder as you go — and seven guesses for the whole day rather than a fresh handful on each pair, so a guess burned on the opener is one the closer no longer has.

Every correct guess shows how many of the day's solvers picked the same man, and that is also the score: rarity adds up across your solves, with 100 for every pair you missed, and lower wins. It shifts all day as more people play. Sign in to be ranked on the daily leaderboard: pairs solved first, then rarest score, then fewest guesses.

Build a Roster — play anytime

Seven roster slots, and each one names a position and a constraint — a draft round, a college, or a span of draft years. Name a player who fits both — the best sixth-round quarterback, the best Miami running back, the best receiver drafted 2005-2009 — and the house has already drafted its own man for that slot. Whoever has the bigger career number takes it.

The house picks are chosen before you see the first slot, so it cannot answer you back. A name that does not fit the slot costs you nothing; you can pass a slot you have no answer for, and you will still be shown the name you were missing. Choose how well the house drafts before you start.

Survivor — play anytime

The same questions the daily asks, one at a time, until you get one wrong. Your score is how many you survived. There is a shot clock on every question and it tightens as you go — twenty seconds at the start, ten once you are past twenty-five.

The players get less famous the longer you last, and the yes-or-no questions stop coming after fifteen, so a long run cannot end on a coin flip. It reads from the same question bank the daily game is built from, all 21,917 of them, dealt endlessly instead of twenty-five at a time.

Where the stats come from

All nine games share one set of career and single-season numbers, drawn from public NFL statistics. Questions and hints are generated from those numbers rather than written by hand, which keeps the games honest and occasionally makes them wrong.

If a number looks off, please report it. That is the fastest way it gets fixed.

Who makes it

One person. BallKnower is not affiliated with the NFL or any team. Get in touch about anything else.