How Plain scoring works

Name: How a Plain round climbs: a 6-second look at the altitude bar
Uploaded: 2026-10-25
Duration: 6 s
Description: Original animation of a night flight climbing a log-scale altitude bar. It illustrates Plain's scoring idea. It is not a capture of playplain.app.

Night flight climbing a yellow altitude bar, poster for the scoring explainer — Original animation of a night flight climbing a log-scale altitude bar. It illustrates Plain's scoring idea. It is not a capture of playplain.app. Checked 2026-10-25.

For anything that is not a year, Plain scores the ratio between your value and the target. Twice the target scores the same as half the target. The official expression is points = round(100 × e^(−2 × d)) where d = |ln(answer ÷ target)|.

I recomputed every published boundary on 2026-10-25. A guess 1% high scores about 98.03, which rounds to 98. A guess 10% high scores about 82.65, which rounds to 83. Double the target scores 25. Half scores 25. The bands below are the official labels for those ranges. I am not quoting a leaderboard. The site does not publish one, and the official rating rules are not documented.

The five bands

Official bands. Dialed also adds 25 points, so a perfect Dialed shows as 125.
Band	Rule	Points before Golden
Dialed	Within 1% of the target	98–100, then +25
Close	Up to 10% over, or up to 9% under	83–97
Warm	Up to 35% over, or up to 26% under	55–82
Cold	At most 2×, and at least 1/2	25–54
Miss	Beyond 2× or 1/2, or no answer	0–24

Chartreuse, green, yellow, orange, and pink chips for the five Plain score bands — Band colors used in this guide. They are not copied from the game UI.

Mountain example, target 6,200 m

This is the worked example on the official how-to-play page. I got the same integers they print.

Official mountain walkthrough, values as published
Answer	Height	Gap	Band	Points
Denali	6,190 m	0.16% under	Dialed	125 (100+25)
Kilimanjaro	5,895 m	4.9% under	Close	90
Mont Blanc	4,806 m	22% under	Warm	60
Everest	8,849 m	43% over	Cold	49
Ben Nevis	1,345 m	4.6× under	Miss	5

A plain number, then a year

Target 12. A guess of 10 is about 69 points (Warm). A guess of 15 is about 64. A guess of 24, which is 2×, is 25 (the Cold floor). I calculated those with the formula. They are not a screenshot of a live round.

Target year 2005. Guessing 2002 or 2008 is three years off, which the rules call Close. Only 2005 is Dialed. The official page does not publish a point table for years, so I am not assigning 90 or 100 to those guesses.

Golden Round and the sink

One round is doubled for everyone, including the Dialed bonus. You see which round it was after you answer. Altitude is points × 10, minus 4 metres for each second after the third, capped at 108 metres lost. Denali at 12 seconds: 1,250 − 36 = 1,214 m. Reference marks on the how-to-play page: cloud 2,500 m, Everest 8,849 m, cruise 9,500 m.

Historical archive points do not always reproduce the currently published formula. For example, #1 prints 91 for 36 episodes against target 35; the current formula gives 95. #3 prints Mexico City International as Dialed with 97 base points, although the current table defines Dialed as 98–100. We preserve historical observations, distinguish them from current calculations, and do not guess the reason for the discrepancy.

Plane beside a vertical altitude scale at night — Altitude is just the score in metres: 1 point = 10 m, up to 10,000 m.

Questions this page answers

What is a perfect Plain score?

1,000. Seven perfect Dialed rounds would be 7 × 125 = 875. The Golden Round doubles one of them, so 6 × 125 + 250 = 1,000.

Does a wrong answer subtract points?

No. You only gain points from the guess. Time after the first three seconds lowers altitude, not the point total.

Why is Close '10% over or 9% under' instead of plus or minus 10%?

The scale is logarithmic. ln(1.10) and ln(1/0.91) are almost the same distance, so the bands meet the formula at 83 points on both sides.