A new game usually starts at day one. Players who opened How likely? on launch day found more than nine months of past days waiting, and one of them asked me how that could be. The short answer is in how roughly picks a day's rounds. The longer one follows, after a look at what the game asks.
The answer is always one in how many
Every round names one event and what it is counted against: people, park visits, hands of cards, years. You set your guess on a scale that runs from 1 to 1 billion. Then the real odds appear with their source, and your miss stands there as a factor. A guess of 1 in 25,000 against a true 1 in 15,300 reads 1.63× too rare.
| Event | Real odds |
|---|---|
| Born in India, 2023 | 1 in 5.7 |
| Lightning, US lifetime | 1 in 15,300 |
| Royal flush | 1 in 649,740 |
| Grizzly, Yellowstone visit | 1 in 3.3 million |
| 10 km asteroid, this year | 1 in 100 million |
That spread is the reason the scale runs to a billion. The answers in this table alone sit more than seven orders of magnitude apart, so a guess is mostly a question of which power of ten you are in. Each number comes from a primary source listed at the end, and the credits page lists them all.
The archive starts on 1 January, not on launch day
Each game on roughly counts its days from a fixed first day. For How likely? that day is 1 January 2026.
The rounds of any date are drawn from the question pool by that date, and every player gets the same five. When the game went live, every date since 1 January already had its own draw. On 9 October that made 281 archive days. Where from?, which came later, works the same way and also reaches back to 1 January.
The pool holds 150 questions, so across 281 days some come back. Within a single day, none repeats.
A backdated archive can look like padding
It is a fair objection: 281 days of a game that is one day old sounds like filler. It would be, if the old days were weaker than today. They are not. Every past date draws from the same 150 questions, and each of those was checked against its primary source before launch. The archive is the same game on a different date, not a second tier of leftovers.
Not every game goes back that far
How big? and What? count from 25 August, How many? from 2 August, so their archives are shorter. The length says when a game's first day was set, nothing about how good the days are.
If you found How likely? this week, play today's five first. Then open a past day: one archive day a day is free, the rest come with roughly+. For more daily games with a number at the end, Amountle counts what you can see, and How likely? asks for what you can't.
Five new odds every day, the same for everyone.
Play How likely?