J! ROYAL RUMBLE Thirty players. Three start. One survives.
Getting in — everyone draws an entry number. Three open; the rest come in one at a time. You won't know who's next, only that somebody is. Your buzzer counts down your last three clues.
Getting it right — every other player in the ring pays you the clue's value. Four opponents on a $400 clue is +$1,600 to you, −$400 to each of them.
Getting it wrong — you lose the value and you're locked out of that clue. It goes straight back out as a fresh race. If somebody else takes it, you pay them too.
Nobody gets it — everyone in the ring loses half.
Below zero and you're out. Zero is still alive.
Arcade or Tournament? Your buzzer says which. Arcade: go under with fewer than three clues taken and you stay up — half stake, your buzz rounded down to the nearest 60 ms for 40 races, once each — and the race shows places, not times.
Still standing? +$500 every 10 clues you survive. Being early in the draw is hard work; this pays for it.
Take a whole column and it washes brass: +$500.
There's a ceiling on your score, and it comes down once the queue is empty.
Overtime — when nobody's left to enter and nobody's going out, clue values double every six clues, up to eight times face. It doesn't stop until somebody breaks.
Waiting your turn? Buzz anyway. Your buzzer works the moment you join. It doesn't score, but it reports your time and place — so don't arrive cold. Turning up late is fine: join any time, go to the back of the queue.
Last one standing wins. Everything else is tracked and posted, and none of it is the winner.
⚠️ Don't jump the lights — buzzing early costs you 250ms. Good players learn the rhythm of the read instead of reacting to it. A perfect buzz reads 0.0.
To play: open the buzzer link, enter the room code, add your name, leave it open — it's your buzzer. There's a watch link too, if you'd rather have the board on your own screen.
The board is six Jeopardy! categories, five clues each, $100 through $500 by row. Some are pulled from the televised archive, some are written by our own people — the host sets the mix. A category that's used up is replaced, so the board never runs dry.
Three players start in the ring. Everyone else waits in the queue in draw order, entering one at a time on a fixed clue interval.
You won't be told who's coming next — only that somebody is, and in how many clues. The entrant knows; the room doesn't. Turning up late is fine too: join at any point and you go to the back of the queue on the same terms as everybody else. If enough people arrive late the entries compress so the match still finishes on time.
The match ends when the queue is empty and one player is left standing. There is no second place that means anything.
Correct — you collect the clue's value from every other player in the ring. Each of them loses that value; you gain the lot.
With five in the ring, a $500 clue swings $2,000 to you and $500 away from each of the other four. With two of you left, the same clue is worth $500. The early game is where the big money is, deliberately — it gives the players who went in first something to build with.
Wrong — you lose the value and you're out of that clue. Nobody else is touched by your miss.
The re-toss — a missed clue goes straight back out to everyone still eligible as a fresh buzzer race. If somebody else converts it, you pay them like everyone else. A miss followed by someone else's correct answer costs you twice.
Nobody gets it — every player in the ring loses half the value. Passing is not free.
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Drop below zero and you're out. Exactly zero survives.
If one answer sinks several players at once, they all go together. The player whose answer did it is credited with a toss out for each — the closest this game has to putting somebody over the top rope.
If a clue would somehow wipe the entire ring, the highest score survives.
### Arcade and Tournament
A match is one shape or the other, and your buzzer says which all the way through.
Arcade has one foot on the floor switched on. Because a player on the way back is ranked with time taken off their buzz, buzz order stops being buzz speed — so the room sees 1st, 2nd, 3rd rather than times. You still see your own reaction time on your own buzzer, to the tenth of a millisecond. You just don't see anybody else's, and nobody sees yours.
Tournament has it switched off. The fastest press wins every race, and the times are public because they mean exactly what they look like.
Nothing else changes between them. The match record keeps every real time either way, and the standings at the end are the same in both.
### One foot on the floor
If you'd go out with fewer than three clues to your name, you don't go out. You stay in the ring on half a starting stake, and for the next 40 races your press is ranked down to the nearest 60 ms — worth one band at most, never a runaway. Once each, and it happens by itself — there's nothing to declare and nothing to press.
The gate is the whole point. It's for somebody flattened before they ever got going, not for somebody who played the match and lost it: three clues taken and you're past it for good. Staying under the gate on purpose means not scoring, which is not a strategy.
If it fires during overtime, your stake climbs with it. Come back at ×4 and you come back with four times the money. Half a starting stake against quadrupled clue values is one pot payment from going straight back out — that was measured at one to six clues of life — and half the eliminations in the recorded matches happen during overtime, so this is the common case rather than the corner one.
You are not clipped to a ceiling you never touched. The roof falls through overtime while the multiplier climbs, so deep enough in they cross — and a returning player used to land on the roof instead of on their stake. Now you are capped by the roof as it stood when overtime opened, and you are not clipped down to the falling roof until your score first touches it. The moment it does, you are on the same footing as everybody else.
This applies to everyone arriving, not just a comeback: walking in for the first time, coming back from revival, or staying up on one foot on the floor.
You are never eliminated when this fires, so nothing that keys off elimination happens either — a bounty on your head doesn't pay out, and a revival life isn't spent.
The edge is counted in races, not clues, so a run of stumpers doesn't burn it. Your real reaction time is what gets recorded and posted; the discount is a ranking rule for who takes the clue, not a rewrite of what you did.
There's a maximum score. Anything above it gets clipped, and it never drops below what a new entrant walks in with, so nobody is capped on arrival.
It holds steady while people are still coming in, and comes down once the queue is empty.
It used to fall all match, and that turned out to be doing the opposite of what it was for. The ceiling clips whoever is ahead, and whoever is ahead is nearly always an early entrant who has been accumulating — a latecomer arrives at a fixed stake, untouched. Across three thousand simulated twenty-player matches the last third of the draw was worth 2.16 times the first third with the ceiling falling, against 1.40 with it steady.
Confining the fall to the endgame keeps the pressure where it belongs without quietly handing the match to whoever drew last.
+$500 every 10 clues you survive. Being early in the draw means spending the whole match being ground down; this pays you for the thing you actually do more of, which is last. It stops at the ceiling, so it helps whoever is grinding rather than whoever is already winning.
+$500 for taking every clue in a column, and the column washes brass. It's counted as you work through, so a board refresh can't rob you of a run you've already finished. In overtime the bonus scales with the multiplier.
When nobody is left to enter — and the last one in has had one entry interval to settle — and nobody is going out, the stakes start climbing. Clue values double every six clues with no elimination, up to eight times face value.
The clock counts only clues where nobody went out. While the field is thinning on its own, the stakes hold — it's a stall-breaker, not a timer. And the multiplier ratchets: an elimination stops it climbing but doesn't put it back.
A missed clue in overtime is brutal. You lose the raised value for the miss and pay it again to whoever converts, so at eight times face a single wrong buzz can take out a player who looked comfortable. That's the point.
Wipe out everyone in the ring while players are still queued and you've cleared the field. You take a bonus equal to every clue left on the board, the board is replaced entirely, and two fresh players come in.
It's rare. It should be.
The host reads the clue aloud, then arms the buzzers. Yours lights up and the clock starts. Fastest reaction takes it. If the lights run out and nobody has buzzed, the clue is over.
Jump the lights and you're locked out for a quarter of a second. The penalty runs even if the buzzers go live while you're serving it, so there's nothing to gain by guessing.
Your buzzer works before you're in. Waiting in the queue, or knocked out already, you can still buzz on every clue. It doesn't score and it can't affect the match — but it reports your reaction time and where you'd have placed against the players who are actually in there. It's the only way to arrive with your timing already dialled in, and it's a lot more interesting than watching.
Timing is compensated for the lag between the call audio and the app, so everyone races from the same instant. Your time is measured on your own device to a tenth of a millisecond. One buzz each per race.
Times well under 150ms are normal here and not a glitch. Good players don't react to the lights — they learn the rhythm of the host's read and time the buzzer to land the moment it opens. A perfectly judged buzz reads 0.0. Aim too early and you eat the lockout instead, which is the whole tension of it.
You keep bleeding. Clues carry on, your score keeps falling, and you can be eliminated while you're offline. Harsh — but the alternative is that dropping out becomes a tactic when you're about to get drained.
Reconnecting puts you back exactly where you were: same score, same entry number, same place in the queue. Just get back in.
Posted at the end, sortable and shareable:
The winner is the winner. The rest is an argument for the group chat.
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Off by default, each switched on separately.
Top rope — declare between clues. The next clue is worth double to you in both directions, and your winnings ignore the ceiling. Strictly bad if you're near the cap: the downside is uncapped and the upside isn't.
Then wait five clues before climbing again. Without a cooldown, anybody who decides doubling is worth it simply declares every clue, and it stops being a decision — it becomes a permanent stake setting the rest of the ring has to play against.
Changing your mind before the clue is read costs nothing. Climb up and climb back down in the same gap between clues and there's no cooldown to serve. The five clues are the price of *riding* a clue at double, not of declaring one — a withdrawn declaration rode nothing, so there's nothing to charge for. You can't use it to peek, either: declarations are only taken between clues, so there is never a clue on the board to look at when you make one.
Targeting — aim at one player, visible to the room. Win the clue and the whole pot comes from them alone, everyone else spared. Lose it to them and you pay a share of the pot on top — and the host decides what that share is.
What an aimed miss costs is a dial. Arcade and Chaos set it to nothing extra, so several people aiming at a runaway leader is affordable; Tournament charges half the pot, because there is no comeback there to soften a bad match. The whole pot — the original rule — is still on the dial.
It became a setting because the price decided who targeting was *for*. Six ordinary players all aiming at the richest player was measured as the worst thing they could do: 5.5% of wins, against 17.3% for the same group not targeting at all, because every aimed miss paid the entire pot and that player wins most races. Ganging up is the room's only real answer to somebody running away with the match, and the price made it self-harm.
Aiming back at somebody who is aiming at you is neither a discount nor a surcharge. If you are the winner's target and you aimed at them too, you pay the focused pot once — never that plus a backfire on top.
Bounties — waiting in the queue, put part of your entry on somebody's head. Whoever eliminates them collects. If they survive to the end they keep it — so does whoever placed it if the target goes out. A declaration, not a free shot.
Revival — eliminated players go back to the queue at a fraction of the stake, with a new entry number. Once each by default. It runs matches half again as long, because nearly every player spends a second life.
Save a player — anyone still in the ring can put money up to buy an eliminated player back. Press S, name a figure. It settles at the next clue so nothing pauses, and several people can chip in for the same player. Partial amounts are allowed: a cheap save is a weak save.
Gift from the queue — waiting to come in, hand part of your entry to anybody already in the ring. You walk in lighter by exactly what you gave.
There's a watch link as well as a buzzer link. It shows the board, the live clue, the buzz race with reaction times, and the ring sorted by score — no key, no login, and the answers are never sent to it.
Use it instead of squinting at a screen share. Everyone's browser draws it locally, so it's sharper than a shared screen and costs a fraction of the bandwidth. One screen in the room can turn on sound.
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ALPHA — this has never been played in a real room. It works in testing and it will have rough edges in front of people. Somebody keeps a console open, and anyone at one can rule a clue or end the match.
Some matches have no human host. Two voices run the room: Mike is the game-show host — he hands the board over, announces the category and value, reads the clue and rules on it — and Gene is the ring announcer, who calls entrances, eliminations, the field clearing and overtime.
The voice plays out of your own buzzer window, not the call, so everybody hears the read at the same instant as their own buzzer. Turn your sound on and click the page once so your browser will play it; the buzzer nags you until it can. The buzzers arm the moment Mike finishes the read.
Whoever has the board calls the next clue, out loud or by clicking. At the bell that's draw number 1; after that it's whoever last answered correctly, and it stays put on a stumper. Say the category and the value — "presidents for four hundred" — or click the clue on the board in your buzzer window. You get twenty seconds, with a countdown on your buzzer, and then Mike picks one for you. The category and value show on screen rather than being read out.
When you win a buzz, say your answer. Your microphone opens for five seconds and closes the moment you finish a sentence. You do not have to phrase it as a question — just answer. If you name only part of the answer, Mike says "be more specific" and gives you the rest of your time rather than ruling you wrong.
Chrome and Edge only: the recognition is your browser's own, and it sends us nothing but the words it heard — we never receive or store audio. Anything else, or saying no to the microphone, costs you nothing: click your clues and answer on the call instead, the way the game has always worked, and a player at a console can still rule.
Object with O if Mike gets it wrong. Any player can — in the ring, in the queue, or already out — from the moment a ruling is spoken until the next one is. The ruling is reversed if a majority of everybody in the match objects, or two thirds of the players in the ring, whichever comes first. Your own objection to a ruling against you counts like anybody else's.
The board goes straight back out while objections are collected, so nothing stops to wait for a vote that usually never comes. When enough arrive, Mike walks the clue back and settles it the other way. Where that is ambiguous — two players were both ruled wrong, say — every buzzer gets a popup listing who answered and what Mike heard them say, and fifteen seconds to pick one or to throw the clue out. Most votes wins; a tie throws it out. A thrown-out clue pays nobody and charges nobody, and it does not count toward the entry clock — as far as the match is concerned it was never read. The board goes back to whoever called it.
1. Open the buzzer link on your phone or a second tab. 2. Type in the four-letter room code the host reads out. 3. Add your name, and a photo if you want one beside it. 4. Leave that page open. It's your buzzer for the whole match. 5. Watch the shared screen for the clues.
Tap the screen once when you join so your browser lets sound through — you'll get a horn when you enter, a countdown over your last three clues in the queue, and something less pleasant when you go out.
Start buzzing straight away, even before you're in. It doesn't count for anything, and that's exactly why it's the right time to practice.