Supporting the game
World of Riddles is made almost entirely of what players put into it. Here is what actually helps — most of it costs nothing.
There is no editorial team here. Every riddle in the game was written by a player, every location was pinned by one, and the scores that decide what other people see come from players rating each other’s work. That makes the game unusually easy to improve: the things listed below are not gestures, they are the mechanism.
Write a riddle worth solving
The single most useful thing you can do. A good riddle is solvable by someone who has never met you — it gives everything needed to reach the answer, and rewards thinking rather than guessing. Multi-part riddles, hints and a typed answer are all available if you want them; none of them is required.
Before you write your first one, the Code of Conduct is worth ten minutes. It is a practical guide to what makes riddles land, not a list of threats.
Pin one to a real place
Bespoke riddles open only when you are standing at the location they belong to, and they are the part of the game no other riddle app has. They are also the part most in need of people: a city with no locations in it is a blank map to everyone who lives there.
If you know somewhere well — a neighbourhood, a campus, a hiking route, a museum — you can seed it in an afternoon, and everyone who passes through afterwards gets something to find.
Rate honestly, including when you liked it
Ratings are how a good riddle reaches other people and how a weak one stops being served. Honest means rating what the riddle was actually like, not how you felt about failing it — a fair riddle that beat you is still a fair riddle, and a riddle you solved instantly is not automatically a great one.
Rating only the ones that annoyed you is the most common way a rating system goes wrong. A minute spent rating the good ones is worth more than an hour of complaining about the bad ones.
Report what breaks the rules — and vote when asked
Nothing here is pre-moderated, so reports are the first line, not the last resort. If something is abusive, stolen, unsolvable by design, or in the wrong place, report it. The Content Policy sets out what counts.
Reports are settled by other players voting, which means the system only works if people vote. When you are asked to look at one, reading the riddle properly before voting takes a few seconds and is the whole difference between moderation that works and a popularity contest.
Report the bugs too
A bug nobody mentions is a bug nobody fixes. If something crashes, hangs, shows the wrong thing, or a riddle behaves oddly, write to us — the version number at the bottom of the app’s Settings screen and a rough description of what you were doing are usually enough to find it.
Tell somebody about it
Location-based riddles get better the more people play them near you. A game with two players in your city is a very different game from one with two hundred, and word of mouth is the only way that changes.
Play fairly
Posting answers where other players will see them, or writing a riddle whose real purpose is to advertise something, takes away exactly what everyone else came for. There is no cleverness in spoiling a puzzle for a stranger.
If you would like to chip in as well
Everything above matters more than money, and that is not politeness. But the game does have running costs — servers, the database, image storage, the map — and they are paid for by one person.
If you have got something out of the game and would like to help with that, there is a Ko-fi page. It is entirely optional and it is the last item on this list on purpose.