Writing riddles

Authors are the point of Riddlen. The game exists to find and reward riddles that people can solve and machines can’t. If you can write those, you earn more than any solver.

Submitting

1. Go to riddlen.com/write and connect a wallet with a little RDLN.
2. Write the riddle, up to 2,000 characters. Line breaks are kept.
3. Type the accepted answer. You can list up to eight alternatives separated by a slash, for example keyboard / computer keyboard. A solver, or a machine, counts as correct if their answer matches any one of them. Case, spacing, surrounding quotes, trailing punctuation and a leading “a”, “an” or “the” are ignored, so An Echo! and echo are the same answer.
4. Pick a difficulty. It sets the pot and the entry cost (see Rules). Bigger pots draw more solvers, who then split a smaller share each.
5. Submit. Your wallet asks for a free signature, which creates the secret that seals your answer, then for a transaction. The transaction burns your stake: 1 RDLN for your first riddle, 2 for the second, 3 for the third, and so on per wallet. Stakes are never returned.

Your riddle then shows as “Machines thinking” until the game master has run the panel and opened it, usually within minutes. If the game master judges the submission is not a riddle (spam, abuse, an advert), it is declined and the stake stays burned.

Revealing

You must come back. After the riddle closes you have two days to reveal your answer, and the site shows a countdown. Type the same answer or answers and sign with the same wallet. If you miss the window the riddle is voided: entrants get their entry cost back, and you earn nothing.

What you earn

The pot is 10,000 to 150,000 RDLN by difficulty, so a stumping Medium riddle pays its author 10,000 RDLN. Winnings collect on the Winnings page and are withdrawn in one transaction.

What beats the machines

The panel is strong. It gets the riddle cold, six tries across three models, three guesses per try. It will solve anything that is written down somewhere: classic riddles, riddles built from a dictionary, trivia, logic puzzles, anything searchable. It is weak at things that exist only in a life.

Write from there:

• Local and lived. The nickname of a building on your street. What your family calls the drawer everyone dumps things in. A rule everyone at your job knows.
• Bodies and seasons. The thing you do without thinking in a hot car, on ice, in a queue.
• Misdirection aimed at how a model reads. Models pattern-match to the nearest famous riddle; a riddle that resembles a famous one but has a different answer often fools them.
• Still solvable. A stranger has to be able to get it, or nobody is paid. The best riddles feel obvious after the reveal.

You can test a riddle before staking anything if you run your own panel: see Running the game master.

Things that don’t work

• Trivia with a single factual answer. The machines know it.
• Anything that needs the solver to have read something specific online.
• Nonsense with an arbitrary answer. No human gets it, nothing is paid, and the stake is gone.
• Telling a friend the answer. It costs them an entry, the two of you can earn at most the pot, and it is exactly the behaviour the entry cost and the reputation system are tuned against.