Orders of Magnitude

How it works

You get six questions about absurd quantities. Instead of the exact number you pick a power of ten: one followed by so many zeros. The game rewards calibrated intuition, Fermi-estimation style. Being within a zero or two of reality is the whole skill.

Scoring. The target is the power of ten nearest the best estimate, in plain linear terms (37 trillion is nearer 10 trillion than 100 trillion). The right power of ten scores 100. Miss by k zeros on an answer of 10ⁿ and you get (1 − k ÷ n) × 100, floored at zero. So big numbers are forgiving and small ones strict: one zero off at 10³⁰ still scores 97, one zero off at 10² scores 50, and a miss as large as the answer itself scores nothing. Six questions, 600 points.

The sky. The background is a WebGL fragment shader: domain-warped value noise for the nebula and three parallax layers of hashed stars, drawn every frame on your GPU. The slider scrubs the sky sideways and shifts its palette, from warm dawn colours at 10⁰ to a dark, nearly empty void at 10³⁵. A good answer makes the stars brighten and flicker; a perfect one sends energy fronts rippling out from behind the card. Panels are frosted glass that tilt toward the pointer. If WebGL is unavailable the page falls back to a plain gradient and plays the same.

Sharing. The share card is four lines: the title with the date, your score out of 600, one coloured square per question (green 100, yellow 50 to 99, orange 1 to 49, red 0), and the link.

The whole game is one HTML file with no build step and no server logic. The answers are in the page, so yes, you could peek. Don't.

Sources

Every estimate is a best guess with a back-of-the-envelope derivation. Where the literature disagrees, the explanation says so. This list is generated from the question bank, so it is always current.

Privacy

This page sets no cookies, uses no analytics, loads nothing from third parties (the fonts are served from this site), and sends nothing you do to any server. Your progress, if the game remembers any, lives in your browser's local storage and never leaves it. There is no account, no tracking, and no advertising.

If that ever changes, this page will say so first.