How to play Trivia Mountain

How a round plays out

There is no start screen — opening the site puts you straight on question one. Each question gives you four options labelled A to D, and exactly one is correct.

• Selecting is not committing. You can change your choice, or tap it again to deselect, right up until you submit.
• Submitting reveals the answer. Press Submit Answer and the correct option is highlighted, your score updates, and the Next Question button appears.
• Nothing is timed. There is no countdown and no penalty for thinking. You can leave the tab open and come back.

How scoring works

The 15 questions are grouped into six stages worth 10, 15, 25, 50, 80, 150 points respectively, and every question in a stage carries the same value. That value cuts both ways: get it right and it is added to your score, get it wrong and the identical amount comes off. A perfect round is 500 points, and there is no floor — your total can go negative.

The full stage-by-stage breakdown, with what to expect from each, is on the scoring table.

Why a coin flip is worth nothing

This is the single most useful thing to understand. Because the reward and the penalty are identical, a pure 50/50 guess averages out to zero over time — you gain exactly as much as you lose. A guess is only worth making when you genuinely believe you are better than a coin flip. When you are not, a skip or a walk-away is the stronger play.

Skips

You get 2 skips per round. A skip passes on the current question at no cost — nothing added, nothing taken away — and still reveals the correct answer, so you find out what you missed.

• They do not carry over. Unused skips are gone at the end of the round.
• Not available on question 15. Plan to have them spent by then.
• Save them for the expensive questions. A skip on a 10-point opener saves you 10. The same skip on question 13 saves you 50.

Walking away

Walking away ends the round on the spot and banks every point you have earned. It is offered in two situations: once both skips are gone, on any question before the last; and always on question 15, when 150 points are at stake and no skip is available.

Walking away is not giving up. With a solid total already banked, declining a coin flip on the summit question is usually the better decision — as the numbers below show.

Worked example: the walk-away decision

Say a round goes like this:

• Questions 1–11 all correct: (5 × 10) + (3 × 15) + (3 × 25) = 170 points.
• Question 12 is a blank. First skip spent — still 170.
• Question 13 you know. Correct, +50 → 220 points.
• Question 14 is another blank. Second skip gone — still 220.
• Question 15 arrives: 150 points at stake, no skips left, and you can narrow it to two options.

Walk away and you finish on 220. Answer and you finish on either 370 or 70. On a genuine coin flip both choices average 220 — so unless you think you are better than 50/50, the safe 220 is the better result. That decision is what the whole game is built around.

Five ways to score higher

1. Read all four options before committing. Distractors are written to look reasonable. The one that sounds right first is often the trap.
2. Only guess when you beat a coin flip. At even odds a guess is worth nothing on average, and it costs you variance you do not need.
3. Spend skips on the expensive questions. Hold them as long as you sensibly can — but do not carry them into question 15, where they are unusable.
4. Bank a good score rather than defending it. By question 14, the summit can take 150 points back off you. Walking away keeps everything.
5. Play the board, not the question. The top three questions are worth 280 of the 500 available. Getting the first twelve right and stopping still beats a reckless summit attempt.

Reading the board

• The ladder — down the left on desktop, a strip of bubbles on mobile — shows all 15 questions and their values. A tick means correct, a cross wrong, a dash skipped.
• The score animates on every answer: a bounce for a gain, a shake for a loss, with the points won or lost floating up beside it.
• The ± figure above each question is what is riding on it, shown before you commit.

Playing on a phone

Trivia Mountain runs in any modern browser and is built for touch as well as mouse. On narrow screens the options stack into a single column and the ladder becomes a horizontal strip that keeps your current question centred. Nothing needs installing.

Where the questions come from

A fresh set is published every day, generated to a fixed brief that sets the difficulty curve and excludes the answers used in the previous thirty sets. Nobody fact-checks them by hand, so errors do get through. The about page explains the process in full, and how to report a question that looks wrong.