How to Play Name 100

1. Choose a mode

Open mode lives on the homepage and asks you to build a 100-name streak. It is ideal for practice, endurance runs, and broad category recall because it accepts any real woman who satisfies the base verification rule. Daily mode lives on a route like /daily/2026-07-11. Each date points to a shared challenge theme, which means every player sees the same target and can compare their result more fairly.

The difference matters. If you want a free-form experience, play open mode. If you want a puzzle-like board that everyone is discussing on the same day, play the daily challenge. Both modes preserve the core input loop, but the daily board adds an extra rule about what kind of person counts.

2. Submit full names

Name 100 works best when you enter a complete person name instead of a loose fragment. The app searches for a matching entity in Wikidata, inspects the public metadata attached to that entity, and checks whether it meets the rule of the current board. A successful answer is stored by entity identifier so the same person cannot be counted twice under small spelling variations.

Good examples in open mode include names like Ada Lovelace, Rihanna, or Greta Gerwig, provided the underlying entity is a real woman with a Wikipedia page. Bad examples include partial names, fictional groups, repeated entries, and people who do not satisfy the theme. For example, a male singer might resolve in Wikidata correctly, but the guess would still fail because the board is about women.

3. Understand the validation rule

The site uses Wikidata as the primary verification source and relies on Wikipedia availability for many of the public-rule boards. In open mode, a valid answer must resolve to a female human with a qualifying Wikipedia page. In daily mode, the same base person may need to pass an additional rule, such as being a singer, director, actor, fictional character, or a member of a curated cast list.

This is why some guesses are rejected even when they look reasonable at first glance. A person can exist in Wikidata but fail the board because the wrong occupation is attached, because the entry is a duplicate, or because the themed challenge is narrower than the general open mode. Featured curated boards can also use a local answer library when the challenge is based on a fixed cast list rather than a free-form occupation category.

4. Know what counts and what does not

A valid answer is usually a real person entity that matches the game rule and has the right public knowledge footprint. An invalid answer can fail for several reasons: it may be empty, too vague, already used, the wrong gender, the wrong occupation, not a person, or missing the required Wikipedia/Wikidata qualities for the active board. A daily character challenge may also reject a real actor because the board expects the fictional character entity instead.

When in doubt, think about the board literally. If the theme says female singers, enter singers. If it says a curated cast challenge, enter credited cast members from that answer set. If the site says the name has already been guessed, treat it as a duplicate warning rather than a full mistake. The app now highlights these states separately so you can tell the difference between wrong, correct, and repeated answers.

5. Finish the board and share the result

Each completed daily run can produce a share-friendly summary with the date, score, and route. That makes it easy to challenge a friend with the exact same board instead of describing the rules manually. The leaderboard page tracks completion time, average guesses, streak progress, and recent history, so returning players can see whether they are improving over time.

If you want your progress to survive a new browser or device, claim a public handle and store the recovery code shown on the leaderboard page. This site currently uses a lightweight recovery-code model instead of a mandatory email account system, which keeps the onboarding simple while still giving dedicated players a path to persistent identity.

Frequently useful reminders

• Use full names whenever possible so the entity search has clear intent.
• Open mode accepts broad women-name knowledge; daily mode is stricter.
• Duplicates do not score, even if the spelling or punctuation changes.
• Curated special boards can validate against a local answer library.
• Save your recovery code if you care about streaks and leaderboard identity.