How to play Longshots

Each Longshots question asks you to name something true: a club that has won the FA Cup, a player who has scored in a World Cup final, a manager who has taken charge of Real Madrid. There are no multiple-choice options and no hints hidden in the question. You type one correct answer, press shoot, and the game decides how far out you strike based on how rare your answer is. Seven questions. Twenty-five seconds each. A maximum of 700 yards.

The trick is that easy answers are worth less. Naming Arsenal for an FA Cup question is a six-yard tap-in; naming Old Etonians is a 100-yard keeper’s goal. You need enough knowledge to be correct, and enough nerve to go for the answer nobody else will think of.

Your total across seven questions gives you a full-time title: Sunday League (0–99 yards), Non-League (100–179), Championship (180–259), Top Flight (260–379) and Ballon d’Or (380–700). A perfect round is seven keeper’s goals: 700 yards.

1. Kick off. The daily round starts with question one and a 25-second clock. You can play on desktop or mobile with a keyboard or touch keyboard.
2. Read the question carefully. The perimeter matters: “men’s World Cup final” is different from “World Cup final”; “Premier League era” is different from “English top flight”. The scope line under the question states any date boundary.
3. Type one correct answer. Press Enter or hit Shoot. If your answer is on the sheet, it is a goal. If not, it is a miss.
4. Watch the shot. The camera moves to the distance of your answer’s tier and the ball travels from there. A tap-in is close; a keeper’s goal starts in your own penalty area.
5. Read the reveal. You will see your tier, your yards, a football fact about the question and how many answers were on the sheet. The full team sheet unlocks at full time.
6. Next shot. Repeat six more times. The full-time page shows your total, title, shot map and match report, and lets you share your score.

Longshots normalises your answer before checking it. Case, accents, punctuation, apostrophes and common club suffixes (FC, AFC, CF, SC, AC) are ignored. So Sergio Aguero, Sergio Agüero and Agüero all count. Common short forms and nicknames — Man Utd, Spurs, PSG, Barça — are accepted through a built-in alias list and per-question aliases.

Small typos are tolerated on longer names, but the game will not guess if your answer could mean two different players or clubs: it asks you to pick one. Every accepted answer is a real answer verified against public records; if a name is valid but missing from the sheet, that is a content bug, not a quiz trick. The about page explains how the sheets are researched.

• Go one level deeper than your first thought. If the obvious answer appears in every pub quiz, it is a tap-in. Ask yourself who else fits — the 1980s winner, the one-season wonder, the club that no longer exists.
• Learn the historic outliers. FA Cup winners from the 19th century, one-club men, caretaker managers, players who won leagues in three countries. These are the halfway-line answers.
• Do not chase the keeper’s goal every time. A safe 18-yard answer is better than a wrong 100-yard guess, especially in Longshots Unlimited where a miss costs a life.
• Read the scope line. The difference between an accepted answer and a miss is often the date boundary or the exact competition name.
• Review the team sheets. After full time, every answer is grouped by tier. That is the best study guide for tomorrow’s round.