Obscura
You are shown a small crop of an NFT. Name the collection it came from.
Get it right and your streak grows - and the noose tightens. Get it wrong and the crop widens, giving you more to work with, but costing you one of your attempts. Run out of attempts and the run is over.
There is no timer. Obscura is meant to be played at your own pace.
The Run
Your streak is the number of puzzles you have solved back to back without losing one. It is not a daily streak - it does not care whether you play every day, and it survives you closing the tab. Walking away costs you nothing.
One failed puzzle ends the run and your streak returns to zero. Your best streak is kept forever as a personal record.
The Noose Tightens
Every tier gives you fewer attempts, more collections to choose from, and less of the artwork to go on.
| Streak | Attempts | Collections offered | Artwork shown |
|---|---|---|---|
| 0-5 | 3 | 6 | 15% → 35% → 60% |
| 6-15 | 3 | 8 | 12% → 25% → 45% |
| 16-30 | 2 | 10 | 10% → 25% |
| 31+ | 1 | 12 | 8% |
The percentages are how much of the artwork's shorter edge you can see, and they widen with each wrong answer within a puzzle - so a first-tier puzzle starts at 15% and opens up to 60% if you miss twice.
From a streak of 31 you get a single attempt against twelve collections and eight percent of the picture. There is no safety net up there, which is the point: the board is meant to be hard to stay on.
Because you are always offered more collections than you have attempts, eliminating your way to the answer is never possible. The run is genuinely losable at every tier.
No Repeats
Within a single run you will never be asked about the same collection twice. Three crops from the same set in one run would make the later ones a gimme, and the variety is most of the interest. Losing the run puts every collection back in play for the next one.
If your streak runs long enough to use up every collection on the platform, the cycle simply starts again - a run is never ended for having gone on too long.
The Reveal
Solve a puzzle - or lose the run - and the artwork zooms out to the whole piece, captioned with the NFT's name, the collection it came from, and, if the holder has made their collection visible, who holds it. Take as long as you like looking at it; the next puzzle waits behind a Next button until you are ready.
The collection name links straight to that collection on Wayup, in a new tab, so if a puzzle introduces you to a set you like you can go and buy into it. The link only appears once the puzzle is over - during a puzzle it would simply be the answer.
Rewards
Obscura runs a weekly leaderboard ranked on your deepest streak of the week, with total puzzles solved breaking ties. The pool is 50,000 CARBON, divided down the board by rank, so finishing well below first still pays.
The end of the week is the one thing that will break a streak. When rewards go out, every run closes and every streak resets to zero, so each week is a fresh race rather than a permanent lead for whoever started earliest. Your all-time best streak is untouched by this and keeps its place on the all-time board.
Your Obscura runs also feed the Leaderboards Activity and Game Master boards, counted the same way a Crypt Crawl delve or a Skull Racer race is.
A Broken Image Never Costs You
The artwork is the game, so a picture that fails to load must never cost you a streak - at 31+ a single attempt is your whole run. Obscura only ever builds a puzzle from artwork it has already confirmed is on the server, and if an image still fails to appear you are given a different puzzle for free: no attempt spent, streak untouched.
No Peeking
The crop is cut on the server, and only the part you are meant to see is ever sent to your browser. Reading the page source will not show you the full artwork, because the full artwork is not there.
See also: Games, Leaderboards, Carbon Emissions.