What Is Rabbithole? The Atlantic’s New Daily Trivia Game, Explained

Rabbithole is The Atlantic’s new daily trivia game: a chain of seven questions in which every correct answer becomes part of the next question. It launched in mid-August 2026 and is written by hand each weekday by senior editor Drew Goins. Play the game at theatlantic.com/games/rabbithole.

The name comes from the familiar tab-spiral of reading online. One Atlantic article leads to a question; that answer opens the next door, and the questions get harder as you go deeper. This post covers how the game works, who makes it, what sets it apart, and where a help page fits if you get stuck.

Rabbithole Comes From a Jeopardy Champion at The Atlantic

Rabbithole is the work of Drew Goins, a senior editor at The Atlantic and a former Jeopardy! champion (colleagues call him “Jeopardy Drew”). The Atlantic announced it across LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube around 20–21 August, framing it as a tunnel of trivia: the deeper you go, the harder the questions get. New puzzles appear every weekday; the in-game archive’s earliest entries are from Monday 17 August.

It joins The Atlantic’s existing games suite alongside Bracket City, the Crossword, Stacks and Trivia. You can play it directly on the official game page. Trade coverage of the launch, including the production details below, appears in Digiday’s 19 August piece by Sara Guaglione.

How to Play Rabbithole

Your journey starts with a single question inspired by an Atlantic article. The day’s title card names the story and writer that sparked it. You answer seven questions in sequence. The signature mechanic is the chain: every correct answer becomes part of the next question. The official example is straightforward. If the answer to Question 1 is “Canada,” Question 2 will mention Canada.

Difficulty rises as you descend. Scoring is simple and matches the in-game rules:

• 3 points for an unassisted answer
• 2 points if you use a hint
• 1 point if you answer from the multiple-choice options

The maximum is 21. Close-enough spellings are accepted.

The interface is clean. A free-text answer box sits with a Submit button. A HINT link gives a one-line clue and drops the question’s value to 2 points. After the hint, a MULTIPLE CHOICE link (three options) drops it to 1 point. A running points counter and “Question X of 7” stay visible at the top. The visual theme is a rabbit descending a burrow.

One practical note from playing: miss the first question and you are suddenly reasoning without the context that later questions assume. The chain turns every answer into both a score and a clue you carry forward. If you want a light assist while you learn the rhythm, our Rabbithole hints and answers page mirrors the same help ladder the game itself offers.

What Makes Rabbithole Different

Two features stand out.

First, the chain itself. Most trivia presents standalone questions. Here context accumulates. Each answer is also information you take into the next round. Bracket City, another Atlantic game, uses a related nested-clue structure; our Bracket City hints page covers that one. Rabbithole applies the idea to pure trivia rather than wordplay.

Second, the production. Goins writes the puzzle by hand every day. He reads Atlantic articles each morning, picks one to inspire the opening question, then builds the remaining six from connections he finds, drawing on The Atlantic’s archive, encyclopedias and JSTOR. The process takes a few hours. A product, engineering and design team spent months turning his storyboard into the live game, debating details such as whether the rabbit should jump or fall down the hole.

Goins has described the project as built “by humans, for humans.” He has also said a good trivia question “has a back door, a side window into the answer,” and that each question should teach you something. Both points are reported in Digiday. The Atlantic is experimenting with access models (fully free versus a registration wall, possibly after three questions), plans a leaderboard for score sharing, and will run a Rabbithole activation at The Atlantic Festival in September.

Where Our Rabbithole Solver Fits In

Our Rabbithole solver is designed to match the game’s own help structure rather than short-circuit it. For each of the day’s seven questions you can choose, in order:

• Hint (a light nudge, matching the two-point tier)
• Multiple choice (the three options)
• Reveal answer (the full answer plus alternate spellings the game accepts)

Later questions stay locked until you reveal the previous one, so the chain is not spoiled ahead of time. A date picker covers past puzzles. The page is free, requires no sign-up, and works on mobile. It is useful when you want to keep a run alive on one difficult question, learn the game’s cadence, or review a finished chain after the fact. It is not meant to replace the fun of solving.

Worth Adding to the Morning Rotation

Rabbithole rewards players who like accumulating context and who enjoy the feeling of reasoning their way into an answer rather than simply knowing or not knowing a fact. If your morning rotation already includes Wordle, Connections or Bracket City, this fits cleanly beside them: short, weekday-only, and tied to real Atlantic reporting. Players who prefer pure recall quizzes or who dislike any form of progressive difficulty may find the chain less appealing.

For a wider view of the daily-games habit, see our earlier post on discovering new titles and the Daily Games Library that collects hundreds of them in one place. Rabbithole is a strong candidate for anyone who wants a hand-crafted trivia puzzle that feels like reading with the tabs left open.

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