How 9at9 works
Nine questions at nine. Three lives. Everyone in your city, at the same moment.
The round
At nine o'clock local time the questions begin, whether you are ready or not. There are nine, one after another, ten seconds each. Three lives. A wrong answer costs one, and so does a question you never answer. At zero you are out for the night.
Three kinds of question, then the city question
The first three are reachable. Two options, nothing specialist, so nobody is knocked out early feeling stupid.
The middle three are graded. "In what year did this happen?" — and you are scored on how close you got. Get inside the tolerance and you keep your life. This is where the near miss lives.
The last three are the decider. One right answer each, and a source shown for every one of them.
Then the tenth: the city question. If you survived the nine, you are asked one thing about your own city that nobody from anywhere else can answer. Get it right and you take the city standing. It never costs a life, so it can never be the thing that puts you out — it only decides who wins.
Playing for a city, and what that means
You can play the nine from anywhere. To play for a city you declare one, and the way you declare it is a postal code.
We only keep the first three characters. L8E, not L8E 0L3. That is all the lookup needs, and it is less of a person to hold. The game does not ask for your location, does not request location permission, and never stores a coordinate.
It is a declaration, not proof. We are telling you plainly: a postal code says which city you are playing for, and a determined person could type a false one. We would rather say that out loud than pretend to a check we do not have.
Guessing it from your address was the alternative, and it does not work. It was tested: the same house was reported as being in two different countries inside ten minutes. A gate built on that would have thrown out most of the real locals and waved through anyone nearby.
What actually stops an outsider winning a city is the tenth question. You cannot fake knowing your own city. Someone visiting can play along, and they can even survive the nine — they just will not take the city standing.
The nearest cities are worked out from your declaration, never from your address. Once you have declared a city, the game lists the rounds closest to it, measured between real coordinates. It does not need to ask anyone where you are: the city you told us is exact, where a lookup is a guess.
The near miss, and why it is real
Most games hold you in an almost-winning state on purpose, forever, and never let it close. That is what a slot machine does, and it is why it works on people.
9at9 uses the same pull — being close is exciting — but it does not fake it. When you go out, the game tells you the truth: which question took you, how many lives you had left, and how many people were genuinely still standing at that moment. That number is counted from real eliminations as they happen. Nobody chose it to keep you playing.
And it resolves. Every single night somebody stands. The loop closes.
What we know about you
Very little, on purpose. No account, no email, no password. You get a random id in a cookie so the game can remember your lives between questions. No location permission is requested, no coordinate is ever stored, and no IP address is kept — not even to rate limit you, which is done on a value that is hashed and thrown away with the process.
If you declare a city we keep three characters of your postal code so the game knows which board you are on. Nothing else about where you are.
You can delete your whole record in one tap, and it is gone: your nights, your finishes, your closest-ever.
Scripts and bots
A script could answer every question correctly and take a city title that a person earned. So the game is built against it: the server owns the clock, an answer cannot be sent before its question opens, a question is never sent with its answer attached, identical answers are refused, and the number of requests one address can make is capped. None of that is hidden from you.
What does most of the work is the city question. A bot can search for an answer. It cannot know your city.
Stopping
Opting out stops everything immediately and permanently. There is no re-engagement, no reminder, no win-back email, and no "are you sure?" maze. Most apps lie about this. This one does not.
Play fourteen nights in a row and stop, and the game retires you quietly and stops counting you. Every other app you have ever used does the opposite.
Money
9at9 is free to play and there is no entry fee, ever. That is deliberate: the moment you charge to enter a game of this kind, it becomes a regulated product, and it stops being something anyone should be encouraged to play. The game is paid for by a local sponsor and by advertising on the results screen, never in the middle of a round.
Where the questions come from
Public statistics, public datasets, and questions submitted by players. Every answer shows the authority it came from. If a question is ever disputed, it is withdrawn rather than argued about.
Credits
Postal regions are derived from the GeoNames postal code dataset, used under a Creative Commons Attribution licence. We use it to turn a postal code into a city name, and nothing else.