Sources, dates, and corrections

Every factual sentence on this site should survive a click. On 2026-10-25 the primary sources were the public HTML pages on playplain.app: home, how to play, about, FAQ, archive hub, archive issues 1–7, sources, impressum, terms, privacy, sitemap.xml, robots.txt, and manifest.webmanifest. I did not call /api/, /dev, or /play. The official robots.txt disallows those paths.

Three kinds of sentence

A rule or a date taken from an official page. The page's source list links that URL. We rewrite the sentence.
A number we computed. The scoring page shows the formula. If our integer matches the official example, we say so. If the archive prints a tier that disagrees with the formula, we keep the archive's figure and flag it. This is not a single-row rounding issue: #1 shows 91 for 36 episodes against target 35, while the current formula gives 95. #3 also labels Mexico City Dialed at 97. We do not infer a historical algorithm.
Something we do not know. Missing categories, the XP curve, the year-round point values, and any 'today' answer before New York midnight are omitted or marked as unpublished. They are not filled with a plausible guess.

Archive rows

For each finished issue we store the category label, whether the round asked for a name or a number, the target, the closest listed answer when one was printed, the gap, the tier, the points, and the source domain. The prompt's joke wording stays on the official page. The published recap table contains only category names and round types, plus three selected commentary notes. Full answer lists stay on the official site. The official terms restrict copying their compiled answer lists. We link the issue page so the full layout remains theirs.

Other names

Music pages, the speaker article, PlainApp, and domain registration dates are cited on the disambiguation page. A registration date comes from RDAP. A missing DNS address means a lookup on that date returned no A record, not that the name can never exist.

Score chips beside a dark panel, standing in for a checked table — If a cell has no source, it does not get published.

Runway at night — Checked dates are in America/New_York when the puzzle boundary matters, and in UTC when we cite an HTTP header.

Corrections go to [email protected]. The change lands on updates with a new modified time.