Drive Order

You get six to nine plays from a single real NFL possession, out of order. Each card shows the down, the distance, what kind of play it was, and how many yards it gained — nothing else.

You know where the drive started and how it ended. Neither tells you the order, so both are context rather than clues.

You are not expected to remember the game. The numbers do the work: a play that begins first and ten and gains four must be followed by second and six. Follow that chain through every card and there is only one way it fits together.

A play that reaches the sticks resets to first and ten. A play that comes up short advances the down and shortens the distance. Inside the ten, a first down becomes goal-to-go.

You get four checks. Each one tells you how many cards are in the right place — deliberately not which ones, because that would let you solve the puzzle by elimination rather than by football.

Solving on the first check is a clean sheet. Your first Daily attempt is the one that counts and cannot be replayed for a better result.

Every drive that reaches this game has been checked by exhaustive search: every possible ordering of its cards is tried, and the drive is only published if exactly one of them is legal. A puzzle with two valid answers would mark a correct solve wrong, and you would have no way of knowing that is what happened — so those are discarded rather than shipped.

Drives with two interchangeable plays, with a penalty that breaks the arithmetic, or with two identical card faces are all rejected for the same reason.

Every card is generated from numeric play data — down, distance, play type, yards. No broadcast commentary or play description is reproduced anywhere in this game. The source and licence are listed on the data sources page.

The yard line and the game clock are hidden while you play and revealed on each card once the drive is rebuilt.