About Scintilla
Last updated 12 November 2026
Scintilla is a free daily puzzle at scintilla.day: connect two unrelated things through a short chain of stops.
How do I play?
Start at the top card and type something its Wikipedia page connects to. Keep going until you reach the bottom card. Two things link when one's Wikipedia page mentions the other.
A new puzzle appears at midnight on your own clock, and only your first try counts. Your nights running grow every day you play a run to its end, win or lose, and survive one missed day a week.
How is it scored?
- Each stop is a card worth up to 250 points. The fewer players who use that stop, the more it is worth. Your best three cards add up.
- Reaching the end adds 250. Each wrong guess or hint takes 10 off that, and each card you play past your third takes 25. Reaching the end is never worth less than 100.
- Speed adds up to 100: all of it if you arrive inside a minute, shrinking to nothing at five minutes. The clock only runs while the puzzle is on your screen.
- Five wrong guesses end the run, and you keep a tenth of your stop points.
- Pages almost nobody reads score low, and giants like countries and world wars score next to nothing.
Each card is named for how rare it is, from the stop everyone picks to the one almost nobody finds:
- space rock
- moon
- planet
- star
- supernova
How many players use a stop starts as an estimate, worked out from simulated players, a forecast made for each puzzle, and how often each Wikipedia page is read. As real players finish, their counts are blended in, and the more players there are, the more the real count decides. Your own run is never counted against you. Scores and ranks keep moving until the puzzle has ended in every time zone, at 12:00 UTC the next day; then they are final.
Where does it come from?
Connections come from English Wikipedia, written by its contributors and free to reuse under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. The game uses page titles, which pages mention which, and how often each page is read. On the results screen, every stop links to its article, where you can see who wrote it.
Scintilla is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikipedia is a trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Puzzles, suggested routes and forecasts were drafted with AI assistance and checked against Wikipedia by a program. Wikipedia changes, so a connection can appear or vanish. If one looks wrong, tell me.
Who made it?
I'm one person, a college student in Tennessee, making this independently for curious teenagers and adults. Write to hello@scintilla.day. I read everything.
Is it free?
Yes. No ads today. Ads may come later, in the side margins on desktop and on the results screen, to cover costs. The Privacy page will change first.
What about my data?
No accounts, no sign-up and no visit tracking today. Your runs and nights running are saved in your own browser, so clearing site data or switching devices loses them.
When you finish today's puzzle, the game sends your run to Scintilla's score store with a random ID and no name: that is how stop counts, ranks and the best route of the night are worked out. Lookups go from your browser straight to Wikipedia, fonts load from Google Fonts, and the site is hosted on Cloudflare. Details are on the Privacy page.