Cosmillion's six scoring tiers
Cosmillion doesn't grade answers as right or wrong — it grades them as crowded or rare. Every valid answer lands in one of six official tiers, and the tier decides the points. Below: the ladder as the official game publishes it, what each band means in practice, and the one tier designed to catch you out.
The point ladder
These are the official tier names and point values the game displays on its results screen (as published on cosmillion.com and as we've seen them while playing). The commentary in the last column is ours.
| Official tier | Points | What it means in practice (our read) |
|---|---|---|
| Tourist | +10 | The answer most players type without thinking. It scores, but it crowds the floor of the board. |
| Overthought | +15 | The trap band: a pick that feels clever in the moment but that plenty of players reach for anyway. |
| Cadet | +30 | A respectable middle answer — common, but not the first thing everyone types. |
| Astronaut | +60 | Genuinely uncommon. Land here consistently and you outrun most of the field. |
| Deep Space | +85 | A rare pull — only a small share of players find it inside the 25 seconds. |
| One in a Galaxy | +100 | The rarest band on the board: answers almost nobody else gives. Worth 100 on its own. |
Why the math pushes you toward rare
The ladder is steep on purpose. One Astronaut (60) is worth four Tourists (10 each), and a single One in a Galaxy (100) beats six crowded answers combined. Across seven prompts, a run of crowded answers limps to around 70 points, while seven rarest-band answers make a perfect 700. Trading a fast obvious answer for twenty extra seconds of thought is almost always the better deal.
The Overthought trap
The band to watch is Overthought (+15) — barely above the crowded floor. It exists for answers that feel smart as you type them but that occur to many players at the same time: the famous example of a category, the "technically unusual" pick everyone's heard of, the answer you're a little too proud of. Feeling clever is exactly the wrong signal; the board rewards answers other players don't reach, not answers that sound impressive.
Our working rule: before submitting, ask whether a well-read friend, hearing the prompt, would guess your answer within a minute. If they probably would — even if it took them a moment — it's likely Overthought territory. Push one step further out, but stay inside what the game will accept as valid.
What a perfect run takes
Seven rarest-band answers in a single launch — 700 points, one per prompt. It's a board-wide race: these tiers reflect what other players picked that day, so the same answer can score differently from one launch to the next. That's why our board reports record the tier each answer actually earned on the day, not what it "usually" scores.
Putting the ladder to work
Our strategy page turns this ladder into habits — candidate generation under the clock, the second-famous pick, and honest options for practicing more than once a day. New to the game? Start with how a launch works.
Cosmillion is a third-party game played on cosmillion.com — we are not affiliated with it (see our third-party games disclaimer). Tier names and point values above are the official game's published scoring, referenced as facts.