About

How Curio builds its questions from Wikipedia, the difficulty levels, scoring and leaderboards.

About Curio

Curio is a free general knowledge quiz for curious minds. Each game has 5 to 20 multiple-choice questions generated from articles of the free encyclopedia Wikipedia: history, geography, science, nature, movies, sports, arts, music, cars, manga, or any mix of topics and sub-topics you like. Curio is also available in French, with questions from the French Wikipedia.

Alongside general knowledge, the Blind test has you guess 30-second music clips, and CurioGuesser asks you to pin places, battles or hometowns on a world map. All three can be played solo, in Ranked or with others (up to 12). Every game earns coins and boosters of Wikipedia cards to collect and trade on the market.

How are the questions made?

Curio picks Wikipedia articles and turns them into seven kinds of questions:

Mystery excerpt: the opening of an article with its title hidden. Can you find it?

Picture: the main illustration of an article. Who, what, where?

Year: when a film came out, a battle took place, a treaty was signed…

Timeline: which of these four films, battles or novels is the oldest (or the most recent)?

Creator: who directed this film, wrote this novel, painted this picture?

Odd one out: three volcanoes and a river, three novels and a painting… spot the one that doesn’t belong.

Country: which country is this mountain, city or landmark in?

To avoid topics nobody knows, Curio only keeps articles people actually read: it measures their daily views on Wikipedia. The wrong answers are always of the same kind as the right one (other films for a film, other singers for a singer), and Curio remembers what you’ve already seen so it doesn’t ask you the same questions again.

Difficulty levels

Easy: the big classics, the most-read articles, with a generous timer.

Medium: well-known topics, a bit more thinking.

Hard: fewer clues and closer traps.

Expert: short excerpts, dates within a few years, and points multiplied by 3.

Each question’s timer adapts to its length, so you have time to read. A correct answer is worth 100 points, plus up to 50 bonus points for speed, a streak bonus (×1.2 at 2 correct answers in a row, ×1.35 at 3, ×1.5 at 5, ×1.75 at 8, reset by the first mistake), then the difficulty multiplier.

Leaderboards

With a free account, Ranked games win or lose you rank points (RP), from Iron to Challenger. The world leaderboard and, if you set your country, the national one rank players by RP, separately for General knowledge, Blind test and CurioGuesser. Only your username, country and rank are shown there.

Free thanks to ads

Curio is free and funded by advertising (Google AdSense). You stay in control of ad personalisation: see the privacy policy.

Credits

Texts come from Wikipedia and are reused under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. Pictures come from Wikimedia Commons, each under its own licence. Every question links to its source article. Curio is not affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation. Blind test music clips are provided by Deezer. This site uses GeoLite2 data created by MaxMind, available from maxmind.com.

Contact

A question, a bug, an idea for a category? Use the report form or email contact@curio-quiz.com.