How to play FootyFacts Board

The full rules of the daily soccer grid: how cells work, how many guesses you get, what hints cost, and how the four game modes differ.

The grid in one paragraph

Every board is a three-by-three grid. Three categories run down the side and three across the top, so each of the nine cells is the intersection of two of them — "Played for Ajax" crossed with "Won the Champions League", say. Click a cell, search for a footballer whose career satisfies both halves, and the cell fills in. Fill all nine and the board is complete.

The rules that actually matter

Any valid answer counts. There is no single "correct" player per cell. A cell holds every footballer in the dataset who satisfies both categories — often dozens of them — and any one of them is accepted.
One appearance per player. A footballer can only be used once on a board. Spending Zlatan Ibrahimović on the easy cell means he is gone from the hard one. Reusing a name costs you nothing — the guess is simply refused.
You get 12 guesses. A wrong answer spends one. In Unlimited mode, guessing is free and you play until all nine cells are filled — good for learning the category set, but the score means less.
Wrong answers tell you why. Name a player who cleared the club but not the nationality and the game says exactly that. Knowing which half you missed is most of the puzzle.
Hints cost 25 points. A hint describes a career without naming the player — the clubs, the era, the honours. Enough to jog a memory, not enough to hand you the answer.

Rarer answers are worth more

This is the part that separates the game from a straight quiz. Filling a cell with the first name everyone thinks of is worth very little. Digging out a player who genuinely fits but who almost nobody would produce is worth many times more. A completed board is not the goal — a completed board full of deep cuts is. The scoring page explains exactly how the number is derived.

The four modes

Daily

One board per day, identical for every player in the world, generated from the date itself. Completing it extends your streak. This is the only mode that can.

Practice

Unlimited fresh boards, generated on demand. They feed a separate set of practice stats and never touch the daily streak.

Competition

A shared board behind one link. Everyone plays the identical grid against a countdown (one, three or five minutes) and the leaderboard reveals when the last player finishes. Competitions never touch your lifetime stats or streak — they are one-off challenges.

Impossible mode

An optional toggle that rejects any answer worth less than 45 points. The obvious names stop working entirely; only genuine deep cuts fill a cell. It is substantially harder than it sounds, and it is the fastest way to find out how thin your knowledge of a club's squad list really is.

What makes a board fair

A board is only published if the generator can prove it is solvable. Every cell must have at least 3 valid answers and no more than 400 — a cell with two thousand answers is not a puzzle — and the six categories must span at least 4 different families so a board is not six variations on one idea.

Those checks alone are not enough, though. Three cells could each have three valid answers and still be unsolvable if they are the same three players, because a player can only be used once. So the generator also runs a bipartite matching between cells and players and rejects the board unless nine distinct answers can exist simultaneously. Boards are re-rolled until one passes.