How to play Depth
Depth is a daily deduction game wearing a team sheet. Twelve players sit on a roster and exactly five of them make up a hidden lineup. A short list of notes tells you things about that lineup — how many play in each position, how many clubs they come from, how old the youngest one is. Every fact about every player starts hidden, and you buy them one at a time out of a budget of a hundred points. Finding the five is never in doubt if you buy the whole table; the game is how little you can spend and still be sure. It rotates through the Premier League, NBA, NHL, MLB and NFL, and the last column changes with the league.
How to play
- Read the notes above the table. They are everything that is true about the hidden five, and nothing about them is a trick.
- Tap any cell to buy that fact. The number printed on the cell is what it costs you.
- Facts are priced differently, and deliberately not by how useful they are. Deciding what is worth its price is half the game.
- Use the + button to pick a player, up to five. Press Check lineup when you have five.
- A wrong guess tells you how many of your five are in the lineup, never which ones. It costs 10 points, so it is a cheap way to test a theory and an expensive way to search.
- Your score is whatever is left of your hundred points. Showing the lineup ends the day unsolved.
Tips & strategy
- Start with the note that splits the roster most evenly. A fact that rules out six players is worth more than one that rules out one, whatever it costs.
- Buy down a column, not across a row. The notes are almost always about one attribute at a time, so twelve ages tell you far more than four facts about one player.
- Position is usually the best opening buy, because the lineup note about it constrains the whole board at once.
- You do not need to know the sport. Every fact you need is for sale, and a fan has no advantage over you at all.
- Stop buying the moment only one set of five can fit. The commonest way to lose points is confirming something you had already worked out.
- A wrong guess costs less than most facts, so when two candidates are left it is usually cheaper to guess than to buy the fact that separates them. Guessing your way through from nothing is not — a dozen wrong guesses spends more than the whole table.
Accessibility
Depth is a real data table, so a screen reader reads every cell with its player and its column heading without anything having to be repeated in prose. No colour carries meaning: an unbought cell shows its price and says whose fact it is selling, a bought one shows its value, and a picked player is marked with a tick and described as picked. Every control is a real button at full tap size, and the whole game plays with a keyboard.