About Hopdown

Hopdown is a free trivia game where you name anything that fits a prompt, like "Name a volcano" or "Name a cheese." The more rarely given your answer, the deeper your bunny digs. You can play it at hopdown.io in any modern browser on a phone, tablet or computer, with no download and no account. The game has become popular on social media, where short clips of players' dives have drawn a lot of views.

How a question works

Each question asks for one thing out of a larger set. You type an answer before the clock runs out. Any correct answer counts, so there is no single right one to guess. The game checks what you typed against a long list of accepted answers for that topic, including alternate names and common spellings, and then looks at how often people think of it.

Naming Paris for a European capital is easy, and naming Vaduz is hard. Hopdown tells them apart. Every answer sits on a rarity scale with six tiers: extremely common, common, uncommon, rare, very rare and deep cut. Common answers move your bunny down a little. Rare ones send it much further. The distance you reach is measured in meters, and your meters build toward a rank that starts at Surface Dweller and ends at Through to the Other Side.

Wrong guesses cost nothing while time remains, so you can keep trying until you land on something that fits.

The burrow

Every answer is a shovel stroke. Your bunny digs a tunnel that runs through layers of soil, one layer for each rarity tier, and the rarer your answer, the more meters it gains. Along the tunnel, signed-in players can run into coins, treasure chests and orange and golden carrots that pay out extra coins. Your total depth builds toward eight ranks, from Surface Dweller through Grass Nibbler, Topsoil Tunneler, Clay Digger, Bedrock Borer, Mantle Miner and Core Diver, all the way to Through to the Other Side. Coins buy dozens of bunny skins and hats, so every dive leaves you with something to spend and something to show off.

Timers

In Unlimited and the daily dive, every question starts with a 15 second timer. The clock tightens by half a second with each question, down to a floor of 9 seconds, so a long dive gets steadily more tense. There is no time to look anything up, so the depth you reach comes from what you know and how fast you can recall it. In live multiplayer and local party mode, the host sets the timer. Pick 7, 10, 15 or 20 seconds, or enter any number from 3 to 60 for a pure reflex round, and the setting applies to the whole room. Multiplayer clocks tighten over the game the same way solo clocks do, scaled to the timer the host chose. Party mode keeps the same timer for every round.

Difficulty levels

Hopdown has five difficulty levels. They change how soon the questions reach rarer answers, and the same five levels work in custom games, party mode and live multiplayer. Unlimited starts right away at the level you last chose in Custom game. The daily dive has a single difficulty so that everyone gets the same seven questions.

• Super Easy sticks to familiar everyday topics with long lists of answers, and it never asks letter questions.
• Easy uses familiar answers and a gentler climb.
• Medium is the standard ramp and the default.
• Hard brings rarer questions in sooner.
• Very Hard asks for deep cuts almost from the first question.

Unlimited mode is completely free

Unlimited is the main way to play. You get a stream of questions with no cap on length and no paywall, and you can play as many rounds as you like. You get three lives. A life is lost when the clock runs out or when you skip a question, and the dive ends when the lives are gone. How far you get depends on how deep your knowledge goes.

All of Hopdown is free. There are no ads, no subscriptions and no purchases. Coins and bunny skins exist inside the game, and they cannot be bought with money. You do not need an account to play Unlimited or anything else described on this page.

The daily dive

Every day has a new set of seven questions, and everyone in the world gets the same seven. After you finish, you see how your depth compares with other players that day, and you can share your result to compare answers and depth with friends or with the creators who post their dives on social media. Playing on consecutive days builds a streak. If you are signed in, your first result of the day also goes onto the public daily leaderboard.

Custom games

If you want a particular kind of run, open Custom game on the home screen. You can limit questions to one or more of the 16 categories, or narrow down to specific topics such as dog breeds or Italian pasta shapes. You can choose a run of 7, 25 or 100 questions, or leave it endless. The Level setting picks one of the five difficulty levels, from Super Easy to Very Hard. A reduced motion setting turns down the animation.

Challenge a friend

When a run ends, you can share a link or a short code. Your friend gets the same questions with the same clock, and the two of you can compare how deep each of you went.

Local party mode

Party mode turns one screen into a game night. One person hosts on a TV, laptop or tablet, and the prompt shows on that screen. Everyone else joins from their own phone with a four-letter code and types answers there. Up to 100 people can play. The player with the rarest answer takes each round. If two players give the same answer, neither can win the round. Players lose a life when they run out of time, and the game ends when everyone is out. The host chooses the timer, the difficulty and the topics before the game starts.

Live multiplayer

Multiplayer is for playing with friends who are in other places. The host sends an invite link or a four-letter code, and up to 100 players can join the room. During each round you see what the other players typed and how fast they answered. Everyone has three lives, and the last player standing wins. The host can set the seconds per question to any number from 3 to 60, choose a difficulty level and choose which topics the room draws from. Rounds avoid repeating the same songs, letters and categories from the last few questions, so a long game stays varied.

Accounts, coins and skins

An account is optional. It needs a username, a password and an email address, and it saves your progress across devices. Signed-in players earn coins from the dives they play and can spend them on bunny skins, which are cosmetic only. Skins show next to your name in multiplayer and on the daily leaderboard. Your email address is used for account messages like password resets. It is never shown to other players.

Explore

The Explore tab lets you browse every topic Hopdown asks about. Each topic page lists its rules, what counts and what does not, and every accepted answer sorted from most common to deepest cut. A button on the page starts a dive on just that topic. It works well for studying before a dive or for checking why an answer scored the way it did.

What you can be asked about

Hopdown has more than 7,000 topics across 16 categories: everyday life, food and culture, animals and nature, geography, sports, finance, history, science, music, film and television, technology, politics and government, economics, literature, art and language. The questions cover the whole world, with cities, languages, foods, teams and people from many countries as well as the US. Some topics are broad, like "Name a country," and others are narrow, like "Name a shape of Italian pasta" or "Name an English football club."

We read every piece of feedback

Hopdown grows because of what players send in. The Feedback link in the footer opens a short form. Tell us about a bug, an answer that should have counted, a topic you would like to see or a question that felt wrong. An email address is optional, and you only need to add one if you want a reply. Every message is read by a person, and many of the changes you see in the game started as a note from a player. Missing answers, extra spellings, new topics and fixes to confusing prompts get added regularly. The game also learns on its own: when five different players type an answer it does not know yet, that answer is added to the topic automatically. You can also write to hi@princetonlock.com.

Frequently asked questions

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