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General

Immaculate Grid: The Game Everyone is Playing

Everyone likes showing off their sporting knowledge, don’t they? However, boring people down the pub with trivia they didn’t ask to hear won’t win you any friends.

Lucky for you then that the Immaculate Grid game has become so popular.

It’s available across lots of different sports, and involves filling a 3×3 grid by correctly naming professional athletes who fit the criteria on the horizontal and vertical axis.

Confused? Don’t be, it’s super simple. I’ll explain how it works below.

What is It?

It’s a bit like a sports quiz, but it’s been gamified.

If you imagine marking off numbers on a bingo card you’re in the right ball park. Except you have to use your sporting knowledge to fill each square, rather than randomly called numbers.

At the top and side of the grid are various different categories, such as nationality, league, club, etc. You need to think of an athlete who fits both categories in order to fill the square, and you only have 9 guesses to do it, so you have to be right every time to get an immaculate score. Importantly, you can’t use the same athlete twice, so some strategy is involved too.

You can play once per day, per sport, and you see your score compared with other people’s as well as the correct answers at the end. It’s quite interesting to see how many possible correct answers there were for each square, and there is a rarity score for your selections too.

Have you seen Pointless on BBC 1? It’s like that. The more obscure your correct answer, the better your rarity score will be.

It’s a great way to compete with others, because everyone uses the same grid with the same categories each day, but your answers can be different. So you can compete on how many selections you got right as well as your rarity score.

How to Play

Just head to the Immaculate Grid site and you will see a baseball grid, plus links to all the other sports.

Choose your sport and that day’s grid will show up. Everyone sees the same grid on the same day.

You can click on each category to make sure you understand what they are as I have done below:

Immaculate grid categories

Click on the square you want to attempt and a search bar will come up. You can type in the name of the athlete you are thinking of and then select them if you are happy.

Top tip: Some athletes have very similar names – each one has their career span next to them to help differentiate so make sure you select the right person!

When you get a selection right a picture of them (or a silhouette) will show up in the box, if you get it wrong, the box will turn yellow:

Immaculate grid selections

You keep going until you give up or run out of guesses, and then you are shown a summary of how you did and some other stats.

These are pretty interesting, because you see your rarity score, the average score for that day’s grid, which squares people did well on or struggled on, how many possible answers there were for each score, the most popular picks for each square, and more.

Immaculate Grid Scores

There is also a link through to the Reference site where there are loads of other related stats available if you wanted to dig into it a bit more.

You can share you results on social media directly, or send them to your mates. Loads of fun.

Where Did the Game Come From?

It came from baseball.

Immaculate Grid was created by a software developer from Atlanta called Brian Minter, and was inspired by the concept of the “immaculate inning”. This is when a pitcher strikes out three batters on three pitches.

The first grid was launched in April of 2023 and was more or less just for Minter and his friends. He had built the software to be automated but ended up selecting categories himself to avoid repetition. However, the game gained caught the attention of a wider audience when one of Minter’s friends shared it on Reddit. The game’s popularity surged even more after it was shared by the Twitter account @FoolishBB in June of 2023.

By mid July 2023, Sports Reference LLC had acquired the game. That’s how quickly it took off.

Sports Reference began adding links to Baseball-Reference.com for valid choices in each square, incorporating more player photos, and announcing plans for versions of the game for basketball and American football too. These, along with an ice hockey version, had all launched by the end of the month, and a soccer version, known as Immaculate Footy, along with a women’s basketball version were introduced in August.

So in the space of 3 or 4 months, the game went from not existing to being absolutely everywhere.