Cosmillion, the daily word game with one launch a day

What “daily” means in Cosmillion

A launch is one run of seven prompts. A day is a calendar date on your device. When the date changes locally, a new launch appears and takes the next number in the sequence. The home screen shows the current launch number, the date it belongs to, and a live countdown to the next one — that is the entire scheduling system, and it is deliberately boring.

There is no second daily attempt and no “extra lives” purchase. If a launch goes badly, the score stands, but the game does not lock you out: the archive and unlimited mode are open immediately if you want another go at the same prompts. The difference is that only a daily launch touches your streak, best and history. Everything else is practice.

The local-midnight reset, explained properly

Cosmillion does not use a server clock to decide when your day starts. It reads the local calendar date from your browser. That has three practical consequences worth knowing.

• The reset is at midnight where you are. Not midnight UTC, not midnight in New York. If you are in Tokyo, launch day 40 starts at 00:00 Tokyo time; if you are in Los Angeles, it starts at 00:00 Pacific time.
• Travel does not break your streak. The game compares local calendar dates, so a long flight that skips or repeats a few hours can make a launch appear early or late, but it will not silently delete your record just because you changed time zones.
• Different time zones can be one launch apart. The prompts themselves are universal — launch number 12 is the same seven prompts for everyone — but for a few hours around the date line, one player may be on launch 12 while another is already on 13. Same launch number always means same prompts.

The countdown on the home screen is the authoritative answer to “when can I play again?”. It is intentionally precise to the second, because a daily game that makes you guess when the next day starts is a daily game that gets abandoned.

Why only one logged launch?

A daily game can be generous or can be fair. Cosmillion chooses fair. If you could replay the daily launch until you liked your score, the shared daily board would be meaningless: the person with the most free time would win, and the number you compare with your friends would only show how many attempts you took.

One logged launch makes the daily score a clean measurement of a single three-minute performance. Everyone got the same seven prompts, the same 25 seconds per prompt and the same one shot. That is what makes a 380 feel like something worth sending to the group chat, and what makes a 95 on a bad morning funny rather than shameful.

The safety valve is that nothing else is restricted. The archive holds every launch that has already aired; themed packs let you play a category you like; unlimited mode generates new runs as often as you want. Play all evening if you like — just know that only the first completed daily launch counts, and only it keeps the streak alive.

The streak is a record, not a leash

Finish a daily launch and the streak increments. Miss a local day and it returns to zero. That is the entire rule. There are no push notifications, no “your streak is in danger” emails, no account to lose and no paid repair. If you miss a week, the logbook still has your best score and every rare answer you discovered, because those records live in your browser rather than on a server that can reset them.

The streak does something subtler than retention: it turns the daily launch into a personal ritual with a visible thread. A 14-day streak is not a grind badge; it is fourteen small three-minute sessions where you sat down, rejected your first answer, and found out what your second one was. That is a nicer thing to protect than a number, and the number is only there to remind you of the thread.

A better daily routine, in four minutes

Most players find that where they play changes what they score. The daily launch rewards a specific kind of attention: fast enough to fit 25 seconds, unhurried enough to reject the obvious. A routine helps more than a word list.

• Read the prompt twice before typing. It costs three seconds and often reveals the wording trick. “Name something you'd hide from a guest” is a different prompt from “Name something you'd hide”.
• Say your first answer in your head, then discard it. If it arrived in under a second, it is probably a TOURIST answer. Use the remaining seconds to step sideways.
• Play before you look at anyone else's score. Comparing first turns the game into a target. The daily launch is more fun as a personal measurement, then a comparison.
• Keep a ten-second reserve. Submit at fifteen seconds, not twenty-five. A typed, valid answer beats a perfect one that never got entered.
• Use the archive when you want volume. Practice prompts in the archive without touching the daily board; read the reveals to recalibrate what the tiers mean.

How the daily launch is built

Cosmillion ships with a fixed bank of prompts and a fixed schedule, generated and checked before launch rather than invented at midnight by a server. Each launch mixes seven prompt categories so that a day is not seven food questions in a row, and no prompt is repeated inside the year. The answer boards themselves are curated by hand: each prompt has a ladder of 30–56 valid answers sorted into the six rarity tiers, with the unusual answers checked for being real, valid and genuinely surprising.

The schedule is static. That means the daily launch cannot be personalised to keep you playing, cannot be A/B tested against you, and cannot quietly get easier when engagement dips. Launch 200 is the same for everyone who opens it, and it will still be the same in the archive next month. The rarity game explains why that fairness matters to the scoring.

After the first year, the schedule wraps into a new season while past launches remain playable. There is no subscription layer, no paid archive, and no “premium prompts”. The whole bank is served as static files from the same Cloudflare edge that serves this page.

Daily word game: questions, answered