About Goaler

Goaler is a football trivia game you play against your friends. You play a puzzle and get a score out of 1,000, then you send the link. Your friend gets the same puzzle and the same clock, and the result is there for both of you to see. There are no accounts and no app to install: a game is a link, and a nickname is all a challenge needs.

The games

Tic-Tac-Toe is a three-by-three football grid: three clubs or countries across the top, three down the side, and in every cell a player who fits both his row and his column. It comes in three levels, Easy, Medium and Hard. The rules, the scoring and tips are on How to play Tic-Tac-Toe.

Goaler is independent and is not affiliated with any club, league or federation.

How the puzzles are made

Every Tic-Tac-Toe board starts from data: which players played for which clubs and countries. Goaler's own rules then build boards that are fair. Every cell must have several solid answers, the whole board must be fillable with nine different players, and each level has its own pool of clubs and nations. On Easy, every cell has famous answers; on Hard, the clubs are still well known but the combinations are rare.

Rules only get you so far, so people check the result. Samples of every new set of boards are reviewed by hand before the set goes live, answers that look wrong are checked against the sources, and players can report an answer from the answers screen after any game. As more people play, the plan is to measure each board's difficulty from real results instead of estimating it in advance.

Where the data comes from

Player careers, appearances and international caps come from Wikidata and English Wikipedia, which are credited on the Credits page. Goaler stores the facts only, not Wikipedia's text, and shows clubs as plain shirts in their colours, never with crests or sponsors.

Contact

Questions, corrections and takedown requests go to hello@goaler.net; the Contact page has the details. Common questions are answered in the FAQ, and the football reads are short articles built from the same data as the game.