Deep Lore Daily mythology trivia game

How to play Deep Lore

Deep Lore is a daily mythology trivia game with a twist: you are not trying to give the right answer, you are trying to give a right answer that hardly anyone else would think of. Every day at midnight UTC there are five new open questions, the same for every player in the world, such as Name a Norse god, Name a dragon from any myth or legend, or Name a creature from Chinese mythology.

You have 40 seconds for each question and one answer counts. If what you type is not on our list, you get a hint and can try something else while the clock is still running. When time runs out the question scores zero. Spelling is forgiving: capital letters, accents, a missing letter and singular or plural forms do not matter, and common alternative names are accepted, so Hercules and Heracles, or Monkey King and Sun Wukong, both count.

After the fifth question you see your score for the day, the beasts you summoned and how far your bestiary has grown. You can play once a day; come back after midnight UTC for the next five.

How rarity and scoring work

Every accepted answer carries an estimate of how many people out of 100 would give it. Rarity is our estimate, not live player data: we wrote each list and judged each answer ourselves, from how well known the figure is and how readily it comes to mind under a 40 second clock. Zeus is an answer most people would reach for; Eileithyia, the Greek goddess of childbirth, is one almost nobody would.

The rarer the answer, the higher the score, from 1 point for the most obvious answer up to 100 for the deepest cut, so a perfect day is 500. Answers fall into five tiers: Common Tale and Known Lore for answers many people would give, Scholar's Lore for the middle ground, Sage's Secret for answers only a few would find, and Lost Legend for answers fewer than 1 in 100 would give. After each question you also see the most common answer and the three rarest answers on our list.

Where the beasts come from

Every right answer summons a beast, and rarer answers summon rarer beasts. All 43 of them come from the Shan Hai Jing, the Classic of Mountains and Seas, and from our free browser game Beasts of Shanhai, where each has a summoning cost from 1 to 4. A Common Tale or Known Lore answer summons a cost 1 beast, Scholar's Lore a cost 2 beast, Sage's Secret a cost 3 beast, and a Lost Legend answer one of the five cost 4 beasts: Bai Ze, the Nine-Tailed Fox, Kui the Thunder Ox, the Torch Dragon and Taotie. The game prefers beasts you have not collected yet.

Each beast you summon joins your bestiary on this page, and every one links to its entry in our Shan Hai Jing bestiary, with the original Chinese text and our English translation. When a rare answer has its own page in our Chinese mythology encyclopedia or the bestiary, we link it too. If you would rather name the beasts yourself, try Beastle, our daily beast guessing game.