The 30-second version
- You play 5 rounds per game.
- Each round shows one clickbait headline and four possible answers.
- Only one answer is what the article actually says.
- The earlier you get it right, the more points you score.
- At the end, you rate one final headline on how misleading it was. Your answer becomes a multiplier on your total score.
That’s the whole loop. The rest is just learning the dials.
Each round has up to three stages
Every round starts with the headline alone and progressively reveals more context if you guess wrong. The more help you take, the fewer points the round is worth.
You see the headline and four possible answers. This is the highest-scoring guess. If you can read between the lines of a clickbait title, this is where you cash in.
Get it wrong and we reveal a clue: two or three keywords plus the publication name. The wrong answer you picked is greyed out, leaving three remaining options.
Still stuck? We reveal the article’s hero image, with two options remaining. This is your last guess.
Miss all three and the round ends with a 10-point consolation score. You still earn the round’s speed bonus on a correct answer at any stage, but only the Stage 1 correct triggers a streak.
The speed bonus
Every correct answer gets a sliding speed bonus on top of the base score. Answering instantly is worth up to +50 points. The bonus scales down to zero at 30 seconds.
The bonus is calculated in milliseconds, which is why no two scores look exactly alike on the leaderboard. There is no penalty for taking your time beyond losing the bonus — we don’t want a stopwatch ruining the game for slower readers.
Streaks
A streak builds when you nail consecutive rounds at Stage 1 with no wrong clicks earlier in the round. Streak bonuses escalate quickly:
Any wrong click resets the streak, even if you eventually get the round right.
The clickbait spectrum (bonus round)
After your 5 rounds, you get one more headline you haven’t seen yet. You don’t guess its meaning — you rate it on a 1–10 spectrum from “totally accurate” to “wildly misleading.” Your rating is compared to the consensus rating from other players (or, for fresh headlines, an AI-seeded rating that converges to player consensus over time).
The closer your rating is to the consensus, the bigger the multiplier we apply to your full game score:
This is where media literacy pays. A run of average guesses with spot-on spectrum reads can outscore a high-confidence run that misjudged the final rating.
Reactions
After every round, you can tap an emoji to react to the headline. There are seven options — 😂 🤯 😤 🙄 💀 🎯 🤡 — and you can pick more than one. There’s also a 👍 / 👎 thumb available throughout the round so you can flag a headline at any point.
We use these to spot which headlines are too easy, too unfair, or genuinely great. Reactions feed back into the content pipeline, so your taps directly shape what other players see.
The daily challenge
Every UTC day there’s one curated 5-round game plus a spectrum headline. Every signed-in player worldwide plays the same six headlines, which means scores are directly comparable on the daily leaderboard.
- Sign-in required — the daily isn’t available to anonymous players.
- One attempt per UTC day. We enforce it at the database level, so clearing your browser data won’t give you a retry.
- If you start a daily and close the tab, you can come back to the same in-progress game later that day.
- Daily scores still count toward the Today / Week / All Time leaderboards alongside Quick Play.
Quick Play vs. signed-in play
You can play For Clicks Sake without an account. Your scores still land on the leaderboards once you create a profile, because we preserve your anonymous player ID when you sign up. If you only ever want to play anonymously, that’s fine too — we just can’t show your name on the leaderboard until you have a profile.
Sign-in unlocks the daily challenge, leaderboard ranking by name, stats on your profile page, and consistent scoring history across devices.
Scoring summary
The maximum a single round can produce:
The end-of-game spectrum multiplier (0.85x to 1.5x) is applied once to the total. A perfect 5-round game with the maximum multiplier tops out somewhere around 1,500 points.
Why this game exists
Clickbait works because vague headlines are profitable. The vaguer the headline, the more clicks. We thought it would be more fun (and a small act of revenge) to turn that vagueness into a puzzle: read the bait, see if you can guess the boring truth underneath, and rate how misleading the framing actually was. The more you play, the better you get at spotting the pattern in the wild. That’s the point.
Ready when you are. Start a Quick Play game →