Brimbob FAQ

Brimbob is free to play in your web browser, and there is no account or sign-up. Open brimbob.com and start pouring. You can also add it to your home screen like an app.

Every day at midnight, your local time. Each day has one numbered puzzle with three glasses: puzzle #1 opened on October 15, 2026, and the number goes up by one each day. If the game is open at midnight, it tells you when the new glasses are in.

Yes. The puzzle archive lists every puzzle up to today, and each one plays exactly like the daily puzzle. Archive plays never change your streak or your record against Pourbot. Future puzzles stay locked until their day.

Pourbot is a bot, not a person and not an AI that memorized facts. It sees every card through foggy glasses: each value is blurred by random noise (about ±25%), fixed in advance by the puzzle number. It then pours the card it believes lands closest to the brim without going over, and repeats until it believes nothing else fits, or until it spills. Its runs are computed when the puzzle is made and sealed with the puzzle, so it can never peek at your play.

Your day total is compared with Pourbot’s, and Stats keep your win, loss and tie record against it for daily puzzles.

No. Brimbob is in English only, and numbers are written the English way, for example 1,234.5.

If you pour just past the brim, up to 103% of it, the liquid bulges over the rim and holds, like a very full glass of water, and Bob balances on top. A glass in surface tension scores the full 100 points, the same as a brimful glass at 99% to 100%. You may keep pouring, but anything over 103% spills.

Because knowing when to stop is the whole game. Points climb faster the closer you get to the brim: 95% scores 80, 98% scores 95 and 99% or more scores 100. If a spill cost only a few points, pouring every card would always pay. A spill ends the glass at once and scores 0, so every extra pour is a real risk.

Each glass has a 45-second clock, which pauses while the tab is in the background or the help is open. When time runs out, the game banks what is in the glass, or scores 0 if you poured nothing. To play without a clock, turn on Relaxed mode in Settings; your share then shows a 🐢.

Your streak counts the days in a row on which you finished the daily puzzle, all three glasses. Every 7 days of streak earns a streak freeze, and you can hold up to 2. A freeze covers one missed day: finish the next daily puzzle and your streak carries on. Miss two days in a row and the streak starts again from 1. Archive plays don’t count toward your streak.

Every number comes from a public dataset: atomic numbers from the PubChem periodic table (NCBI, U.S. National Library of Medicine, no copyright claimed), population, country area and capital city locations from the World Bank (CC BY 4.0), and food energy from USDA FoodData Central (CC0). Atomic numbers, country areas and capital coordinates are cross-checked against Wikidata (CC0). After each glass, the result names its source, and the game’s Sources & honesty page, linked at the bottom of its home screen, lists every dataset with its license and retrieval date. So does the list at the end of this page.

Each glass shows what it measures and in which unit: atomic numbers, people (in millions), km², km or kcal per 100 g. Populations use the World Bank’s full figures: the cards and the brim show them in millions with one decimal place, while the glass adds up the full numbers. Country areas are rounded to whole square kilometers, distances between capitals are measured as the crow flies and rounded to whole kilometers, and food energy is rounded to whole kilocalories per 100 g. Atomic numbers are exact. The fill is shown to one decimal place, and points are rounded to whole numbers.

Every puzzle’s answers are sealed and hashed before it opens. The game’s Sources & honesty page lets you check those hashes in your browser, for every past puzzle and for today’s once you have finished it. If a number ever needs fixing, the fix is listed in the corrections log on the same page. A score never changes after its glass ends.

No. Brimbob sets no cookies and has no analytics or tracking. Your progress, stats and settings stay in this browser’s local storage and are not sent anywhere. To move them to another browser, use “Move my stats” in Settings: it gives you a transfer code to paste there.

Yes, after your first visit. The game saves itself in your browser, together with the puzzle you opened and the next day’s puzzle, so it opens without a connection. A puzzle you have never loaded needs a connection the first time.