How to rank numbers you don't know

Every card in Molionaire is a number you probably have never looked up. You still have to put it in the right hill, and you only get 12 seconds. Here is how to turn a guess into a good guess.

Start with something you know

This is anchoring. Find a number you know well and measure the card against it. A Big Mac bun has a few hundred sesame seeds, not a few. A big city has hundreds or thousands of traffic lights, not a handful. Even a rough anchor beats a blank mind.

• Pick the closest thing you know: your street, your kitchen, a stadium, your own body.
• Ask if the card is bigger or smaller than that, and by roughly how much.
• Do this for each card as it arrives, before you look at the hills.

Check for a multiplier

Some cards use a stated multiplier, like 100 buns instead of one. When you see one, strip it away and think about the single item first. Then multiply back up. Guessing the whole number cold is hard. Guessing one bun and multiplying by 100 is easy.

Also watch for what is being counted. A number per person, per day or per mile is a different size than the total.

Think in orders of magnitude

You do not need the exact number. You need to know if it is closer to 1,000 or to 1,000,000. Each step up by ten times is one order of magnitude, and a gap that big almost always means a different hill.

1. Decide the number of digits first: tens, hundreds, thousands, millions or more.
2. Only then ask where in that range it might sit.
3. If two cards are in the same order of magnitude, they are your hard calls. If they are far apart, the call is easy.

Save the middle hills

You must bury each card before you see the next, and a buried card cannot move. That changes how you play.

• A card that is clearly huge goes in hill 1. A card that is clearly tiny goes in hill 5.
• A card that feels average is the risky one. Do not rush it into hill 3 just because it feels middle.
• Keep the middle hills open for as long as you can. Use the ends for the clear cases, and the later cards can still land in the middle.

The reason is simple. A card in a middle hill is never more than two hills from either end, so a wrong guess there costs less. But a middle hill is also the one you are most likely to need for a later card. Do not spend it early on a maybe.

Mind the clock

Twelve seconds is short, and if it runs out the mole picks a random empty hill, which is rarely good. A quick plan works well:

1. Read the card and say what it counts.
2. Name your anchor and the multiplier, if there is one.
3. Pick the order of magnitude, then the hill.

Use Mole Intel when a card leaves you with no anchor at all. It reads you the base fact behind that card. You get one a day, so save it for the toughest card in round 3, where each hill is worth the most. See how scoring works for the numbers.

Learn from the reveal

After each round the true values appear with a source. This is the best part. Notice which of your anchors were off, and by how much. Over a few days your sense for big and small numbers gets sharper, and that is what moves you up the tiers.