In the anatomy post we said the best questions live in a narrow band — gettable, not googleable — and that difficulty ramps across three point tiers within every topic. That was the theory. This is the theory with its sleeves rolled up: one topic, real questions, and exactly why each one sits where it sits.
The topic: space probes. Concrete enough to research, deep enough to hurt, beloved by tables everywhere.
The 100: the handshake
Which pair of NASA probes, launched in 1977, each carry a Golden Record of Earth's sounds and images?
Answer: the Voyagers (Voyager 1 and 2).
The 100 is the topic saying hello. Anyone who'd choose space probes has met the Voyagers, and the Golden Record is the kind of detail that's famous well beyond the topic. Crucially, there's still a reasoning path for the half-sure: "the golden record thing... that was the one leaving the solar system... Voyager." A 100 should be answerable three ways — knowing it, half-knowing it, or thinking it through — and this one is.
What a bad 100 looks like: "Which planet do Mars rovers explore?" Nobody feels clever answering that. Too easy isn't generous, it's admin — the table just waits while someone reads a sentence with a blank in it.
The 250: the half-known
In 2014, the Rosetta mission's lander Philae made the first-ever soft landing on what kind of object?
Answer: a comet.
The 250 rewards people who follow the topic without living in it. Rosetta was front-page news, but a decade has passed — you might remember the drama without the details. And notice the reasoning room: even if you never heard of Philae, "Rosetta... that was the one chasing the thing with the tail" gets you there. The answer is a category, not a serial number, so half-knowledge has somewhere to land.
The googleable version of this question — "How many kilograms did Philae weigh?" — tests nothing but whether you've read one specific table on one specific page. No path to it, no satisfaction from it. That's not a harder question; it's a lecture with a pause in it.
The 500: the expert pause
Carried to Saturn aboard Cassini, what ESA probe made the first landing on a moon other than our own when it touched down on Titan in 2005?
Answer: Huygens.
A fair 500 makes the expert pause — not because the fact is obscure, but because it's deep in the topic and precision matters. The expert knows Cassini; the question asks about the passenger. And there's still a ladder for the brave: Titan → Saturn → "the Saturn mission was Cassini-something" → the something is the answer. Hard with a reasoning path is a bet you can win; hard without one is a coin you flip.
The unfair 500 fails in one of two ways. Either it's secretly a 100 wearing a costume — "What probe named Huygens landed on Titan?" leaks its own answer — or it's conflated or padded: "Name the probe that landed on Titan and its launch year" punishes a player who knows the hard half for missing the trivia-pub half. One fact, one bet, honestly priced.
The same ramp, any topic
Here's the part that makes this work at scale: the ramp is relative to the topic, not to the universe. A 100 in The Silmarillion would be a 500 in general knowledge, and that's correct — because the player who picked The Silmarillion made a promise too. Difficulty is calibrated within each topic: the 100s welcome in anyone who'd choose it, the 500s make its expert sweat, and the review pass checks the ramp before the board is dealt.
So when you're picking your six topics, don't fear the deep cuts. The board will meet your table exactly where it lives — the 100s will still say hello, and the 500s will still start arguments.
That's the band. Type six topics and watch all 36 questions land inside it.