The Criterion, a Pokémon quiz in ten sudden-death rounds
The Criterion shows an instruction ("Find the one that cannot learn Ice Beam", "Find the one that has the ability Torrent", "Find the one under 60 Speed") and four Pokémon. Only one of them fits: that is the one to click. Ten rounds follow one another, and a single mistake ends the run.
Odd One Out, reversed
In the Odd One Out quiz the shared trait is hidden and the player has to name it. Here it is the opposite: the criterion is written on screen, and the whole difficulty is knowing which of the four Pokémon fails it. There is never any ambiguity about the question, only about the answer.
Statements draw on three families of data: moves learnable in the most recent game where the Pokémon appears, abilities, and base stat thresholds. A fourth layer builds up across the run, that of the difficulty tiers.
Typing does not tell you what a Pokémon can do
The rule holding the mode together is that no visible trait on the cards may point at the odd one. It is never simply the only Fire type on the grid, the only legendary or the only unevolved one: those rounds would be solvable without knowing a single learnset, and they are filtered out at generation time.
A visible trait pointing at ANOTHER card, however, is allowed, and that is the whole point of the game. Dragonite learns Ice Beam without being an Ice type; Chien-Pao is an Ice type and does not learn it. On the last rounds those decoys become the norm.
The same run for everyone
The daily chain is the same for every player, in all four languages of the site. Two runs are allowed per day and the better one counts for the leaderboard: rounds cleared first, then time as a tie-break.
How to play
- Read the instruction above the grid: it describes the Pokémon to find.
- Click the one that fits it, not the other three.
- Chain ten independent rounds: forty different Pokémon, none of them comes back.
- One mistake ends the run. You get two runs a day.
The moves and abilities used are the most played in competitive play: a criterion nobody knows would not make a round hard, only random. The first three rounds cover well-known ground, the last three are sharp.