How to play ARBITRAGE

ARBITRAGE is a daily trivia game built around one deceptively simple question: which is worth more? Each day you face a five-duel match, and in every duel you weigh two things against a single metric and back your judgment. If you like the once-a-day rhythm of Wordle but crave a test of intuition rather than vocabulary, this is your kind of puzzle.

The goal

Every day there is one match made of five duels, the same match for everyone in the world. For each duel you are shown two things — people, films, companies, collectibles, almost anything — alongside a metric such as net worth, box office, market cap or sale price. The numbers behind each card are hidden. Your goal is to pick the side with the higher value, and to do it five times in a row for a flawless 5/5. There is no typing and no guessing of exact figures: you are simply judging which one comes out on top.

How to play

A match plays out as five quick rounds, and each round follows the same beat:

• Read the duel. Two cards appear side by side, plus the metric you are comparing them on. Read the metric carefully — it changes everything.
• Tap the higher value. Tap the card you believe scores higher on that metric. That is your entire input for the round.
• Watch the reveal. The hidden numbers roll up on both cards, odometer style. The winner glows green with an up arrow ▲; the loser turns red. You see the real figures and a line of context explaining the result.
• Build a combo. Chain correct answers in a row to grow a combo multiplier — the longer your streak within the match, the more each pick is worth.

After all five duels the market closes, you get a score out of five and a "market intuition" percentage, and a fresh match unlocks at midnight.

A worked example

Suppose a duel pits Blockbuster against Netflix on the metric "market value at peak." The hype says it's no contest — Blockbuster is the byword for a company that died, Netflix the giant that buried it. But the question isn't who survived; it's who was worth more, and when. At its height Blockbuster was a multi-billion-dollar retail empire with thousands of stores, while early Netflix was a small mail-order DVD startup. Read literally, the "loser" of history can easily win the duel. ARBITRAGE rewards exactly that habit: pause, anchor the comparison to the right era, and trust the history instead of the headline.

Strategy tips

• Adjust for inflation and era. A blockbuster from the 1970s and one from last year aren't measured in the same dollars. If a metric is historical, mentally scale older figures upward before you decide.
• Beware recency bias. The thing that's famous today isn't always the one that peaked highest. Fame fades faster than the numbers it left behind.
• Totals versus peaks. Check whether the metric is a lifetime total or a single-moment high. A long career can out-total a brighter but shorter one — and vice versa.
• Distrust the obvious. The "obvious" answer is often the trap. When a duel feels too easy, that's your cue to second-guess the popular assumption.
• Protect the combo. A multiplier is only as strong as your streak, so on a genuine coin-flip duel, slow down — one careless tap can reset everything you've banked.

Daily match, streaks & sharing

The daily match is generated deterministically from the date, so everyone plays the identical five duels — that's what makes comparing scores fair. Finishing keeps your daily streak alive, earns Prisms (the in-game currency for unlocks), and feeds a score distribution and achievements you can track in your stats. Your share is spoiler-free: it shows a row of green and red squares with your score and market-intuition percentage, never the actual answers, so you can post it without ruining anyone's match. There's also a global leaderboard with daily, weekly and all-time boards, plus unlimited practice matches when you want more.

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