Card Oddball

Each day you get five puzzles. Each puzzle shows four sports cards. Three of them share a trait — same sport, same decade, same rookie status, or same value tier. The fourth card breaks the pattern. Your job is to tap the outlier. Score 20 points per correct answer, plus up to 10 time-bonus points for answering within 5 seconds. Max single-puzzle score: 30. Max round score: 150. Grades: 135+ = S, 110+ = A, 85+ = B, 60+ = C, 30+ = D, below 30 = F. Daily seed means your puzzles match the community's — good for sharing.

SPORT — three cards from one sport (e.g. three baseball, one football). DECADE — three cards from the same decade (e.g. three from the 1990s, one from the 1980s). ROOKIE — three rookies, one veteran card (or vice-versa). VALUE TIER — three cards in the same rough raw-value band ($0-100, $100-500, $500-2K, $2K-10K, $10K+), one from a different band. Each puzzle picks one category at random (via daily seed). The revealed answer names the category and shows why the outlier differs.

Cards have many attributes. In a SPORT puzzle, three baseball cards + one football card will differ on MANY axes — era, set, value, player — not just sport. The PRIMARY category is what was randomly chosen for that puzzle. The revealed answer explicitly names the category so you understand the intended pattern. If you tapped a different card that ALSO legitimately breaks a different pattern, you were not wrong in reasoning — but the puzzle's category is fixed, so only the designated outlier earns points. Treat it like Connections — multiple groupings exist, but one is canonical.

No — daily mode is one-shot. After you finish the 5 puzzles, your result is stored in localStorage (plays, wins, streak, best score, grade histogram). Free-play mode lets you run infinite practice rounds with fresh puzzles each time (no stats tracking). This matches the canonical Wordle pattern: daily is scored and comparable across the community; free-play is for warm-up.

The daily seed is today's date (ISO YYYY-MM-DD). FNV-1a hashing of the seed + puzzle index produces deterministic card picks from the 10,000+ sports card catalog, filtered to ensure the 3 similar + 1 outlier structure is clean. Two players on the same day see the same 5 puzzles in the same order. Different days produce different puzzles. This is why sharing a score is meaningful — everyone played the same board.

Each puzzle has a hidden 5-second clock. Answer within 5 seconds and you earn 10 bonus points on top of the 20 for correctness. Answer between 5-10 seconds: 5 bonus. Answer after 10 seconds: 0 bonus. No time penalty for being slow (other than losing the bonus). The clock resets for each puzzle. If you pass or answer wrong, you skip the bonus but can still try to answer correctly for the 20 base points.

After the 5th puzzle, click "Share result." The share text is a compact 3-line summary: "Card Oddball [date] · [score] / 150 · [grade]" plus a 5-emoji result ribbon (🟢 for correct on time, 🟡 for correct slow, 🔴 for wrong). Works great on X, Discord, Bluesky. Friends can compare grids daily — the Wordle pattern. The emoji ribbon reveals your puzzle pattern without spoiling the actual cards, which means you can share results before others have played.

First, quickly scan all four cards for the MOST DIFFERENT one. If three cards feel "the same" in vibe and one feels "off" — trust the gut. Second, after your first guess, if wrong, the reveal tells you the category — this is a learning signal for future rounds (you'll start to spot decade vs. sport patterns faster). Third, in VALUE TIER puzzles, don't trust gut price reads — a vintage $300 card can look more expensive than a modern $1500 card; use rookie status + era as value proxies. Fourth, in ROOKIE puzzles, check card fronts for RC/XRC logos carefully.