Ask a room full of people what year the Eiffel Tower opened and almost nobody will know it cold. Ask them whether it was closer to 1850 or 1950, though, and most of them will get there. People are a lot better at estimating than they give themselves credit for, and that's the idea behind this one.
Ballpark asks for a number: a year, a height, a distance, a count. You slide a ruler to your best guess, and the closer you land, the more you score. You don't have to be exact. It's one of four free bonus modes in Trend Trivia® 1.6.0, along with Fact or Fiction, Spell It Out and Clue by Clue, and it's free for everyone from the home screen.
How a round works
A round is 10 questions. Each question states its unit, so you always know whether you're guessing feet, miles, years or something else. Under the question there's a big readout of your current guess with a minus and a plus button on either side, and below that a ruler with the low and high ends of the range labeled. For the Eiffel Tower, that's 1870 on the left and 1970 on the right.
You can drag anywhere on the ruler to jump to a spot, then use the minus and plus buttons to nudge it one step at a time. The ruler clicks as you drag, a bit like a dial. When you're happy, tap Lock it in.
Then comes the reveal, which is the best part. Your handle shrinks to a small white marker. A gold answer pin drops in right where you guessed and slides over to the real answer, pulling a gold band behind it that shows exactly how far off you were. The readout splits into Your guess and Answer side by side, and a card underneath tells you your result, how far off you were ("Off by 7 years"), and your points.
How close counts
This is the one thing worth understanding before you play. How close you were is measured against the size of the ruler, not the size of the answer. On a ruler that runs from 1870 to 1970, the range is 100 years, so being off by 7 years is a 7 percent miss. Every guess lands in one of four tiers:
- Bullseye: within 1 percent of the range. Worth a flat 1,000 points.
- Close: within 5 percent.
- In the ballpark: within 15 percent.
- Way off: anything further than that.
Outside of a Bullseye, points start at 900 and drop off evenly until they hit zero at a 30 percent miss. That 7 percent Eiffel Tower guess works out to 690. A 3 percent miss is worth 810, a 15 percent miss is worth 450, and anything past 30 percent gets nothing. A perfect round of ten Bullseyes is 10,000.
The progress bar at the top colors each question by how you did (gold for a Bullseye, green for Close, blue for In the ballpark, red for Way off), and a Bullseye gets a little target under its segment so you can spot them at a glance. For XP, anything In the ballpark or better counts as a correct answer, and your daily streak multiplier applies on top. A round also counts toward your daily streak.
The results screen
At the end you get your total, a row of chips counting how many of each tier you hit, and three stats: Close enough (In the ballpark or better), Bullseyes, and Avg miss. Below that, Your guesses lists all ten questions, each with a mini ruler showing where you guessed, where the answer was, and the gap between them. Scroll through it once. It's the quickest way to see whether you tend to guess high, guess low, or just get blindsided by one kind of question.
A few things we built in on purpose
The middle is never the answer. The handle starts in the center of the ruler, and every answer sits well away from the center. You can't score by leaving the handle where it started. You have to commit.
The range isn't a giveaway. We don't center a ruler on a famous round number sitting right next to the answer. The ends are there to give you a sense of scale, not to hand you the answer.
The answers don't change. Ballpark only asks about things that stay put: when something happened, how tall or long something is, how many of something there are when that number is fixed. No populations, prices or records that get broken next year. If you learn the answer, it stays right.
A Bullseye is always possible. On some long rulers one step is bigger than one unit, but every question is set up so a careful guess can land within 1 percent.
How to get closer
Anchor on something you do know. You might not know when the Eiffel Tower opened, but maybe you know it was built for a world's fair in Paris, or that it's older than the Empire State Building. Pin your guess to the nearest fact you're sure of and adjust from there.
Use the ends of the ruler. The range tells you the scale of the answer. If a height question runs from 500 to 2,500 feet, you're not looking at a house, and that alone rules out a lot.
Think in eras for years. Before or after the Civil War? Before or after World War II? Two or three quick questions like that can get you inside the 15 percent band on almost any date.
Drag first, then fine tune. Get close with one drag, then use the plus and minus buttons for the last few steps. It's much easier than trying to land it by finger.
Close is a great score. The gap between a 3 percent miss and a Bullseye is 190 points. The gap between a 15 percent miss and a 35 percent miss is 450. Avoiding the big misses matters more than chasing the perfect one.
The Bullseye badge
Land 10 guesses within 1 percent and you earn the Bullseye badge, worth 500 XP. It counts across all your rounds, so it'll come with time. It's one of 60 badges in the app now.
Will you see repeats?
Not for a good while. The game remembers every question you've answered. New ones come first, then the ones you got wrong, and only after that does anything come back around. The pool is 500 questions right now, which is 50 full rounds, and more are coming.
If you quit partway through a round, it isn't scored, but the questions you already saw count as seen.
Where to find it
Update to version 1.6.0 on iPhone or Android and tap the Ballpark tile in the grid under Solo Play. The intro screen shows the ruler with a quick example and walks through the rules once. After that, Play Again goes straight to the first question.
Play Ballpark
Free for everyone on iOS and Android. Update to Trend Trivia 1.6.0 and find it under Solo Play.
The other three free modes
- Fact or Fiction: read the statement and decide if it's real or made up.
- Spell It Out: guess the answer one letter at a time, with six bulbs to spare.
- Clue by Clue: who am I? The earlier you call it, the more it's worth.