The principle: one generation a day, ten questions
A game of The Lore is ten questions about the games of a single generation, with four options each time. The generation is announced before you start: you know whether you will be talking about Kanto or Paldea, and you can decide to wait for a day that suits you better.
There is no sudden death. A mistake does not end the game: the right answer appears at once and the next question follows. You answer all ten either way, which turns every mistake into something learned rather than a lost game.
You do, however, only get one game a day, and that limit is enforced by the server: switching browser or device does not get around it.
How the generation of the day is drawn
The generation is not cycled through, it is drawn at random, but with a draw weighted by waiting: the longer a generation has been absent, the likelier it becomes. A generation can therefore come back after four days or wait three weeks, which a fixed cycle could never do.
Two safeguards frame that draw. The first is a minimum gap of four days: a generation can never return sooner, even if chance picks it. The second is that the draw is a function of the day and nothing else: everyone plays the same generation on the same day, which is what makes scores comparable.
In practice, waiting for your favourite generation makes sense: every day without it makes it more likely.
What the questions cover
Questions come from seven families, and their spread is guaranteed: a game cannot be made of ten questions that all look alike.
- Encounter rates: which Pokémon appears where, at what percentage, with which method. At most one fifth of the questions.
- Version differences: what changes from one edition to the other in the same place.
- Trainers: a Gym Leader's team, the level of one of their Pokémon, one of its moves, the prize money after the battle.
- TMs and HMs: which move a machine contains, and how much it costs. A number alone means nothing to anyone, so the questions name the move: "TM05 (Roar)".
- Releases: dates and consoles.
- In-game trades and the nicknames of traded Pokémon.
- Shop prices.
Not every family exists for every generation: the more recent games do not have paired versions documented the way the older ones are. The quiz then fills in with the other families rather than serving a shorter game.
The clock: what separates the score from the reward
Two things happen at once, and they are not judged the same way.
The leaderboard takes every game, whatever time you took. Your score there is your number of correct answers, and time only separates two players who are tied.
The reward asks for both: a perfect run, and under 2 min 30 for the ten questions. That ceiling is not there to rush you. Fifteen seconds per question is plenty when you know the answer, and the clock only bothers someone looking it up in another tab: that is the realistic cheat in a lore quiz.
In short: play calmly if you are after the leaderboard, and only take your time on a day when the reward does not matter to you.
What a perfect run earns
A perfect run within the time limit awards a starter of the generation you played, drawn among the three, and only among those you do not own yet. You never win the same one twice: no perfect game is wasted as long as you are missing a starter from that generation.
Since the twenty-seven starters are spread across the nine generations, collecting them means coming back regularly: each generation returns after four days at the earliest, and it takes three perfect runs to complete a trio.
On top of that comes an independent chance: every correct answer gives a 1 in 1024 chance of a shiny, including in a game where you make a mistake. Ten correct answers are therefore ten draws, and this is the only way to get the shiny versions of the starters.
A method for answering
A lore quiz is played by elimination first, like the other formats on the site.
- Look at the order of magnitude first. On a price or a rate, the four options are often a factor of ten apart. Ruling out the absurd leaves two plausible answers before you have even thought.
- Use the version named in the question. A question always says which game it is about. An answer that is right for a remake is not necessarily right for the original.
- Beware of near-miss decoys. The wrong answers are not random: they are real values, borrowed from another location or another machine. An option that "sounds right" is not right for that reason.
- Do not get stuck on one question. With no sudden death, a mistake costs one point, while hesitating for three minutes costs the day's reward.
And to brush up before diving in, the guide to Pokémon generations recaps the region, Pokédex range and mechanics of each one.