Rank It: How to Play, How Scoring Works, and How to Earn Perfect Order

Which is taller, the Matterhorn or Mount Fuji? Most people can tell you Everest is the tallest mountain on Earth. Far fewer could put the next three in order without stopping to think about it. That stopping to think is the whole game.

Rank It gives you four things and one measure, like oldest to newest or tallest to shortest, and asks you to put them in order. It's one of two new free modes in Trend Trivia® 1.7.0, along with Odd One Out, which brings the free bonus modes to six. There's nothing to unlock and no subscription involved.

How a round works

A round is six lists. Each list has four cards and a prompt across the top, like "Oldest to newest" or "Hardest to softest." The numbers 1 to 4 run down the left side and stay where they are, with a label at each end so you never lose track of which way is up. Only the cards move.

Press and hold a card, drag it to where you think it belongs, and let go. The cards it passes slide out of the way to make room. You'll feel a light tick every time it crosses into a new spot. Under each card is a short grey line to help you place it, like the country a mountain is in or the band that made an album. It never gives away the number.

When you're happy with the order, tap Lock it in. There's no timer, so shuffle them around for as long as you like.

Then comes the reveal. Each card lights up green or red right where you left it. A moment later all four slide into the true order and the real values fade in on the right. Cards you got right say Right spot. The others tell you where you had them, like "You had it #3," so you can see exactly how close you came.

How scoring works

Every card in the right spot is worth 100 points. Get all four and you pick up a 200-point bonus on top, so a perfect list is worth 600. Six perfect lists is 3,600, the most a round can score.

That bonus is where lists are won and lost. Swap two cards that sit next to each other and you lose 200 from the cards and the 200 bonus with them, so one swap takes a list from 600 down to 200. Here's a fun one: you can never get exactly three right. If three cards are in the right spot, the fourth has nowhere else to go.

The bar across the top fills in as you play, one segment per list. Gold means perfect, purple means you placed some, and red means none. The XP you earn at the end is based on how many perfect lists you got, and your daily streak multiplier applies on top of that. A round of Rank It also counts as playing for the day, so it'll keep your streak going.

What the results screen tells you

When the round ends you see your total, then six tiles, one for each list, showing how many of the four you placed. Perfect lists turn gold. Under those are three stats: your perfect lists, the total number of cards you placed, and your XP.

Then there's the This round card. It lists every prompt with what it scored and four small bars, one for each spot, so you can see at a glance which end of the list tripped you up. Usually it's the middle.

How the lists are made (and why that helps you)

A few of the rules we write by will make you a better player, so here they are.

• No coin flips. Neighboring values are always at least 10 percent apart, or at least three years apart for dates. If two things are close, they don't share a list.
• Nothing up for debate. Depending on who did the measuring, the Nile or the Amazon is the longest river in the world. Anything like that stays out, so you're never arguing with the answer key.
• Facts that stay put. Every value is one that won't change next year. No populations that shift every census, no records that are about to fall.
• The grey line never has a number in it. It's there to help you recognize the thing, not to hand you the answer.
• Plenty of variety. Lists come from 13 topics, from Animals and Space to Food & Drink and Movies & TV. Years show up a lot, but most lists are about something else: heights, speeds, sizes, distances.

Tips from playing a lot of it

Find the ends first. You usually know which one is the biggest or the oldest, and often which one is the smallest. Put those in place, then spend your thinking on the middle two.

Use the grey line. It won't tell you the value, but it can jog your memory. Knowing a mountain is in Japan or an album came out of Seattle is often enough to put it in the right decade or the right range.

Lock in what you're sure of. If you know two cards for certain, put them where they belong and make your best guess with the other two. Worst case, you walk away with 200. Best case, 600.

Think in eras. On a year list, you rarely need the exact year. Before or after the moon landing, before or after the internet. That's usually enough to sort four things that are at least three years apart.

The Perfect Order badge

It's one of four badges that came with 1.7.0. The others are Missing Link for Odd One Out, Free Spirit for playing a round of all six free modes, and Marathon for playing 10 rounds in a single day. That brings the app to 64 badges.

Will you see repeats?

Not for a while. The game keeps track of every list you've played. Lists you've never seen always come first. After those, the ones you got wrong come back before the ones you nailed, and only then does anything cycle around. We're adding new lists all the time.

Where to find it

Update to version 1.7.0 on iPhone or Android, open the app, and look for the Rank It tile in the free-mode grid under Solo Play. The intro screen shows a quick demo, with Sputnik 1, Hubble and Apollo 11 getting sorted by year, and runs through the rules. After your first round, Play Again skips straight to the first list.

The other free modes

• Odd One Out: spot the tile that doesn't belong, then name what links the rest.
• Fact or Fiction: real or made up? You find out why either way.
• Spell It Out: guess the answer one letter at a time, with six bulbs to spare.
• Ballpark: slide a ruler to your best guess at a number. Close counts.
• Clue by Clue: who am I? The earlier you call it, the more it's worth.

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