The hardest boards so far

Every number here comes from our own play data on 7 October 2026. Every board named is in the archive with its answer, so you can open it and disagree.

Each board carries a difficulty label, easy, medium or hard, decided before anybody plays it. 53 boards have now been played 210 times and solved 97 times, so for the first time there is enough to ask whether the label is telling the truth.

Partly. The ranking is right and the rate is not, and the reason turned out to be a thing the label cannot see.

What the label is actually measuring

The score is three numbers and nothing else. How many people read the musician's Wikipedia page, weighted 55 percent. How many releases are on the board, weighted 30 percent. How many years the career spans, weighted 15 percent. Under 0.45 is easy, under 0.62 is medium, the rest is hard.

So it is a guess about how well known somebody is, with a small adjustment for how much board there is to work with. That is deliberate and the archive says so. What it means in practice is that the label never looks at the board a player sees. The genre column is not in the formula. Neither is the shape of the years, so a career with everything bunched into four years scores the same as one spread evenly across forty.

The tiers, measured

Read the solve rate column and the labels are wrong: medium boards get solved 12 points more often than easy ones. Read the last column and they are right, 20 then 16 then 14, in the order you would want.

The difference between those two columns is help. Hints became unlimited on 26 August, so the plain solve rate now measures how much help people took as much as how hard the board was. On medium boards 40 percent of players solved with a hint. On easy boards it was 23 percent. Easy boards are easier, as labelled. They just do not collect the hint-assisted solves that push medium past them, and we cannot tell you from this data why not.

Take the no-hint column as a floor rather than a figure. A player we cannot identify across a session cannot be shown to have solved without help, so some unaided solves are not counted as unaided.

Five boards with enough players to talk about

This is where the honest answer is dull. Of 53 boards played, five have been started enough times to say anything, and all five ran in the first three weeks of August, when a link on r/WebGames sent most of the traffic this site has ever had. Every board since 23 August has between one and seven starts. Three boards marked easy sit at a solve rate of zero percent, and they are nought from four, nought from one and nought from one, which is not a finding about anything.

Usher and Foreigner: the same rate, a different game

Both were marked easy, both were solved by 42 percent of the people who started them, and one took twice as many guesses as the other. Usher went in 2.55 guesses on average. Foreigner took 5.00.

The genre column is the difference, and it is the column the label cannot see. Usher's board shows seven genres: contemporary R&B, crunk, dance music, dance-pop, hip-hop, pop music and soul. Crunk alone cuts the field to a handful of people and a few years. Foreigner's board shows two: hard rock and rock music. That fits several hundred acts and gives away almost nothing, so players had to work it out from sixteen masked titles and a run of years from 1977 to 2025 with a sixteen year hole in the middle of it.

Same label, same solve rate, and the experience of the two boards is not comparable. The score had no way of knowing, because it was looking at Wikipedia readership and counting rows.

Jeff Buckley: the worst easy board, and it was our fault

2 of 12 is a lower rate than any board marked hard. The cause is already written up on the page about what our data gets wrong, and this is the clearest example of the cost.

He released one studio album in his lifetime. The board that ran on 22 August showed eleven releases, one of them listed twice because MusicBrainz stored the same record as two separate entries and our builder carried both through. A board with eleven rows does not look like Jeff Buckley to anybody who knows who he is, which is most of the people the label expected to find him easy. It shows nine now.

The label called him easy for a defensible reason: he is very widely read for someone with one album, which is exactly what the fame input measures. What went wrong is the other half, the board, and the board was broken.

Asking Alexandria: the label was too cautious

8 of 9, the highest rate of any board with a real sample, and it was marked medium. Its score was 0.505, almost exactly the middle of the range.

The board shows thirteen releases between 2007 and 2024 with a record in almost every year and no gap longer than three, and two tight genre tags, metalcore and alternative rock. An unbroken annual run plus a narrow genre is a lot to go on. Nine people is nine people, so we are not re-labelling anything on it, but it points the same way as Usher and Foreigner: what makes a board guessable is what is printed on it, and the score is not reading that.

MØ: correctly hard, and we checked it for a bug

Marked hard, scored 0.712, solved by 30 percent, and the highest mean guess count of the five at 6.25. The label and the measurement agree.

There was an obvious thing to suspect and it is not there. The answer is two characters, one of them Ø, and a player on a US keyboard cannot type it. We checked: the matcher folds the non-decomposing Latin letters explicitly, ø among them, with its own test covering every entry. Typing MO matches. The board was hard because it is six rows, two genres and a musician most people have not heard of, which is what hard is supposed to mean.

What we are changing, and what we are not

Not the thresholds. 210 starts across three tiers is too thin to re-fit anything, and the one thing this data can carry is that easy beats hard, which it does on both measures.

The thing worth fixing is narrower and it is not a threshold. The score cannot see the genre column or the shape of the years, and both of those are doing real work in the numbers above. A board with two generic genre tags is a harder board than the same career with seven specific ones, and nothing in the current formula knows that.

We will not pretend that is a finished diagnosis off five boards. It is the first thing to look at when there is enough play data to look with, and writing it down now means we cannot quietly decide later that we knew all along.

Play today's board, or read every board that has run with its answer.