About Scintilla

Last updated 12 November 2026

Scintilla is a free nightly puzzle. You get two Wikipedia articles that have nothing to do with each other, and you connect them one stop at a time.

Playing

Type a stop into the box, and it lands if its Wikipedia page mentions the card before it, or if that card's page mentions it. Rhymes, synonyms and things that only feel related do not count, because the link has to be written on Wikipedia. Keep going until a stop reaches the bottom card.

Five wrong guesses end the run. A new puzzle starts at midnight on your own clock, and only your first try at it is scored. Your count of nights running goes up each night you finish a run, win or lose, and it forgives one missed night a week.

Scoring

• Every stop is a card worth up to 250 points, and it is worth more the fewer players use it.
• Your best three cards count in full and every other card counts half.
• You have fuel for six stops. Every stop after the sixth scores nothing and takes 75 off your total.
• Reaching the end adds 250, less 10 for each wrong guess, hint or undone card, and never less than 100.
• If you run out of guesses you keep a tenth of your stop points.
• Countries, world wars and other giants score next to nothing, and so do pages almost nobody reads.

Each card carries a name for how rare its stop is:

• space rock
• moon
• planet
• star
• supernova

Before anyone has played, the game estimates how many players would use a stop from how often its Wikipedia page is read and from a forecast written for that puzzle. Real players' choices replace the estimate as they come in. Scores and ranks keep moving until the puzzle has ended in every time zone, at 12:00 UTC the next day, and after that they are final.

Wikipedia

Every connection comes from English Wikipedia, written by its contributors and free to reuse under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license. The game uses page titles, which pages mention which, and how often each page is read. Every stop on the results screen links to its article, where you can see who wrote it.

Scintilla is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Wikimedia Foundation, and Wikipedia is the Foundation's trademark.

The puzzles, suggested routes and forecasts were drafted with AI and checked against Wikipedia by a program. Wikipedia changes, so a connection can appear or vanish, and I would like to hear about any that looks wrong.

Who makes it

I am one college student in Tennessee, and I make Scintilla on my own. Write to hello@scintilla.day and I will read it.

Cost

Scintilla is free and carries no ads today. If ads come later they will sit in the side margins on desktop and on the results screen, and the Privacy page will change before they appear.

Your data

There are no accounts and no visit tracking. Your runs and your nights running are saved in your own browser, so clearing site data or switching devices loses them.

When you finish tonight's puzzle, the game sends the run to Scintilla's score store under a random ID with no name, which is how stop counts and ranks are worked out. Lookups go from your browser straight to Wikipedia, fonts load from Google Fonts, and Cloudflare hosts the site. The Privacy page has the details and a button that deletes your runs.