Frequently Asked Questions

Each day's puzzle features ten celebrities. For each one, you see a portrait and a category tag. You can guess right away for the maximum points, or reveal clues first to make it easier at the cost of a lower potential score. The celebrity's name is only revealed after you guess. After all ten guesses, there's an optional bonus round.

Each question is worth up to 100 points if you guess from the portrait alone. Revealing one clue (“known for…”) drops the maximum to 60 points. Revealing all clues (nationality and peak fame decade) drops it to 30 points. Wrong answers cost you half the potential points at the stage where you guessed.

The full breakdown lives on the How to Score page.

Before each guess, you set a wager to multiply the stakes. A 1x wager (Safe) caps your earnings at 100 points and your penalty at 50. A 2x wager (Bold) doubles both. A 3x wager (All in) triples them, with a maximum of 300 points or a 150-point penalty per question.

The wager is the most important strategic decision in the game. Confident guesses are worth a lot more than careful ones, but they punish you harder when you're wrong.

After you finish all ten questions, you get a bonus round on every celebrity you guessed correctly. For each one, you use a slider to guess their birth or death year. The closer you get, the more points you earn:

• Exact year: +75
• Within 1 year: +50
• Within 3 years: +25
• Within 5 years: +10
• More than 5 years off: -25

The bonus round is optional. You can skip it entirely, or skip any individual question, with no penalty.

3,750 points. That's ten questions at 300 points each (a perfect run with all 3x wagers from the portrait alone), plus ten bonus rounds at 75 points each (exact year guesses). Nobody has ever come close. If you do, I'd like to hear from you.

A new puzzle publishes daily, shortly after midnight US Eastern time. If you're in another time zone, the daily reset will happen at whatever the local equivalent is. Once the new puzzle is up, yesterday's is gone for good.

No. Once you complete a day's puzzle, you're done until tomorrow. If you miss a day, that puzzle is gone. The daily ritual only works if it's actually daily.

Not currently. Stat tracking and historical puzzle review are planned for the account system that's coming.

At the end of each round, you can copy a spoiler-free summary card with your score, your hit/miss pattern, your best play of the day, and your current streak. The card is designed to look good on social media without giving anything away to people who haven't played yet.

The leaderboard ranks players by total score over a rolling window. Higher cumulative scores climb the board. You don't need an account to appear, though anonymous players show up without a username.

Dead Last tracks the player with the lowest score over a rolling five-day window. It is exactly what it sounds like, and yes, some players actively campaign for it. There's a separate Dead Last entry for the worst anonymous score, since players without usernames can compete for the title too.

Yes. The window is rolling, so a single decent day can knock you out of the running. This is a feature, not a bug.

Celebrities are chosen for recognition value, with a deliberate tilt toward names where the answer isn't obvious. The sweet spot is anyone whose status genuinely makes you pause. The full philosophy is in the About page.

Yes, please. Use the contact form and include the name plus any context that would help (why they're a good fit, region they're known in, why their status is interesting). Suggestions don't always make it into rotation, but they're read and considered.

Yes. The database is approaching a thousand names and growing, and to fill a daily puzzle of ten celebrities across a full year, repeats are necessary. The rotation tries to keep a healthy window between appearances so you're not seeing the same person twice in a short span.

When a celebrity I've featured dies in real life, I pull them out of the active rotation for an extended period. The site is not a celebrity death tracker and never will be.

Probably one of two reasons. Either I haven't gotten to them yet (the database grows constantly, send a suggestion), or they don't quite hit the recognition threshold. The game works best when most players have at least heard of the person. If only a few thousand people in the world know the name, they're a tough fit, even if you and I think they're great.

Because US entertainment media has spent the last seventy years aggressively colonizing the world's attention, and most globally recognized celebrities are American as a result. I push against the skew where I can with international names, and I'm always looking for suggestions of celebrities who are huge in their home regions but underrepresented elsewhere.

Yes. I don't include anyone whose death was particularly tragic or violent in a way that would make the guessing feel cruel, and I don't include people who are publicly known to be gravely ill. Those aren't funny.

No. You can play anonymously, and most players do. Accounts are planned as a future feature for cross-device stats, history, and personal trends.

Right now, your progress is stored locally in your browser, so playing on your phone and your laptop will give you separate streaks and stats. Once accounts ship, syncing across devices will be the main reason to make one.

Yes. Am I Dead? works in any mobile browser. There's no native app, and there are no current plans for one. The web version is built to feel good on phones since that's where most players actually play.

The full breakdown is in the Privacy Policy. The short version: enough to make the game work and to understand basic usage patterns. Nothing creepy, no selling of data, no third-party tracking pixels beyond standard analytics.

A solo developer working under Bandito Software LLC. There's a longer version in the About page, including the origin story (it involves a wife, a remote control, and a lot of small arguments).

Yes, obviously. But there's a difference between morbid and mean. The full answer is in the Ethics section of the About page. The short version: the joke isn't on the celebrities, it's on us, the players, for having such a hazy grasp of who's still around.

Currently the site runs on a tip jar. Players who enjoy the game can leave a few dollars to help cover hosting and development. Display advertising is also in the works and may appear on parts of the site over time. The daily puzzle itself will stay clean.

Aggregate stats yes, individual players no. The leaderboard shows usernames of top scorers, and the Postmortem section publishes weekly recaps with featured players, but I don't expose who specifically played a given day.

Postmortem is the weekly recap section. Every Monday it covers the previous week of gameplay: which celebrity surprised people, biggest upsets, longest streaks, notable Dead Last campaigns, and other things worth talking about. It's how the site processes its own daily ritual out loud.

Use the contact form. I read everything, even when I don't reply. Especially the angry ones.

Send it via the contact form. The wager system, the bonus round, Dead Last, and the share cards all came from player feedback. The next good idea is just as likely to come from you as from me.