Play and compete

The four modes

1vWorld

You against everybody else playing right now. Jump in, answer, watch your position move.

1v1

Head to head against one person. Challenge a friend or take one that is waiting for you.

Group Play

One host, a room full of players, everyone answering the same question at the same time. Built for a classroom.

Daily Quiz

A fresh, school-safe current-events quiz every day. Small enough to do before class, regular enough to become a habit.

Practice, ranked and the leaderboards

1 Player has two settings. Practice earns XP at your own pace and never touches a rating. Ranked rates you against everyone who played the same quiz, so your 1vWorld rating rises and falls with how you did.

The leaderboards rank 1 Player by the XP earned this week, this month and all time, and 1v1 and 1vWorld by rating once your placement games are done. Only Public Arena matches change a 1v1 rating, so games with friends stay casual. In the Public Arena you can pick a waiting player yourself, or tap Find a match and Knovli pairs you with someone near your level, widening the search the longer you wait. After every ranked match you see how your rating and your global rank moved, alongside the XP you earned. Your Progress page shows your competitive profile: your 1v1 and 1vWorld rank, rating and global place, beside the Solo XP you earned this week. Your own place is always shown, even when you are nowhere near the top, and student accounts appear on the global boards anonymously, never by name.

Everything counts towards the same progress

A win in 1v1 earns XP exactly as a flashcard session does, holds your day streak the same way, and moves the same rank ladder. Badges come from both sides of the app.

That is deliberate: a student who only ever plays still ends the month further ahead than a student who did nothing, and a student who does both is not choosing between them.

Challenges

Knovli runs challenges: a stretch of days with something to achieve in it — play on five separate days, clear a minutes bar, keep a run going. Meet one and the badge is awarded automatically; there is nothing to claim and nothing to submit.

The one or two worth acting on appear on the Play dashboard, and the Challenges page lists every live one with how far along you are and how long is left.

Finding a game

The Play dashboard opens on two rows. Popular Games is measured — the deck-and-format pairings people are genuinely playing right now — and Featured Games is hand-picked. Either is one tap to start.

If you want something specific, play from your own decks, from Explore, or from a class you are in, and then choose the format. Whatever you pick feeds the same progress and the same leaderboards.

Search works on quiz groups too: type a group’s name, such as Halloween, and every quiz in that group comes up.

A Featured Game can also have its own link, knovli.com/try/ followed by its name. Opening one starts that game straight away. A 1 Player game needs no account: play first, and sign up at the end to keep the score.

Dropped out? Jump back in

A reload, a crashed tab or a closed app no longer ends a game. Open Knovli again on the same device and a bar offers to Rejoin: you go back in where you left off, score and all. It works for a live 1v1 match of Brain Blitz or Mind Match, and for Group Play, including for players who joined as a guest. If a Brain Blitz Royale game in Group Play finished while you were away, the bar offers See your results instead, for up to two hours.

When the other side drops out, nobody is punished for it. In a 1v1 match, once your opponent has been gone for over a minute you can keep waiting or end the match with no loss for either player. In Brain Blitz Royale, if the teacher hosting loses their connection, players see that the game is waiting for the teacher to reconnect, and it carries on when they are back.

Knovli Escape

Knovli Escape turns any deck into an escape room. Pick a deck — your own or a public one — and choose Knovli Escape, or choose the Knovli Escape game in Knovli Play, then play it straight away. Every lock opens with what is on the cards, and the escape is saved for next time.

Share yours to the public arena and play everyone else’s. A shared escape is checked first, as a public deck is, and anything the check cannot clear waits for a person to review it.

Ready-made wording is unlimited. A free account can have the story and clues written by AI three times a month; teachers and paid accounts have no limit.

Safe by default

Competitive modes are gated on age, and a teacher or district can switch Group Play hosting off for their students without hiding the mode — a student can still join a game somebody else is hosting.

Profile pages are off for students unless both the student and their teacher switch them on, and even then a student profile is only visible to the players their class matchmaking allows — never anyone outside their school. A district can turn student profiles off entirely. Adults choose for themselves: off, signed-in users only, or a public link they can share.

Younger accounts are handled under the same COPPA rules that govern the rest of Knovli, including what advertising they can be shown.