Outrank strategy

Outrank looks like a trivia game and is really a calibration game. You are not being asked to recall facts; you are being asked to estimate magnitudes. That is a skill, and it responds well to a handful of rules of thumb.

Food energy: fat is the whole story

Per 100 grams, the calorie count of a food is dominated by two things: how much fat it contains and how much water it does not. Fat carries about nine calories per gram; protein and carbohydrate carry about four; water carries none. So the reliable heuristic is dry and fatty beats wet and lean, almost always.

This is why nuts, oils, crisps, biscuits and hard cheeses sit near the top and why fruit, vegetables, milk and cooked grains sit near the bottom — cooked pasta and rice absorb enormous amounts of water, which is why they score far lower per 100 g than people expect. When you are shown two foods and cannot decide, ask which one is drier. You will be right more often than not.

Sugar: the trap is savoury food

Sugar rounds punish people who sort food into "sweet" and "not sweet". Dried fruit is mostly sugar by weight because the water has been removed. Sauces, cured meats, breads and dressings routinely carry more sugar than fruit that tastes far sweeter. Meanwhile many genuinely sweet-tasting things — most fresh fruit — sit in single digits per 100 g.

The heuristic: dried beats fresh, processed beats whole, and anything with a sauce is higher than it looks.

Dry and fatty beats wet and lean, almost always.

Protein: concentration, not source

Almost all cooked lean meat and fish lands between 20 and 30 g per 100 g, which makes meat-against-meat rounds close to a coin flip. The differences that decide rounds are elsewhere: hard cheeses and dried legumes are high, anything with significant water or fat is diluted, and cooking concentrates protein while raw weight dilutes it. If both options are meat, look for the drier and leaner one.

Calories burned: it is mostly intensity × time

All the activity figures are thirty minutes at 75 kg, so duration is held constant and only intensity varies. Running, swimming, competitive sport and hard manual work cluster high. Walking, most household activity and anything performed sitting cluster low. The frequent surprise is that vigorous everyday tasks — moving furniture, digging, carrying loads upstairs — beat many gym activities, and that "exercise" performed gently is worth much less than it feels.

Distance: your mental map is distorted

Geography rounds are the ones people lose. Two distortions do the damage. The first is the flat-map distortion: on a standard world map, routes over the far north look absurdly long when they are in fact the shortest way between Europe and East Asia or North America. The second is that we badly underestimate how large the Pacific is and how far south Australia and New Zealand sit.

The correction: think in terms of a straight line through the globe, not a line across a rectangle. And when a round involves anywhere in Oceania, assume it is further than you think.

How to actually play

Answer quickly on the early rounds — they are ordered easiest first and second-guessing an obvious landslide only costs you confidence. Slow down from round seven onward, where the gaps narrow to a few percent. When you genuinely have no idea, fall back on the dominant driver for that category: fat for calories, water for everything per 100 g, intensity for activity, and hemisphere for distance.

Getting eight is normal. Getting ten means either you have good instincts about magnitude or you got a friendly draw — and the shared result tells your friends which of the ten were coin flips, so they will find out.