Fives

How to play

Build a chain of five teammates

Each player must have been at the same club, at the same time, as the one before. The club you connected through shows under each name.

START

Wayne Rooney
#2

Cristiano Ronaldo

Manchester United
#3

Karim Benzema

Real Madrid
#4

?
#5

?

Every day adds a twist

A banned nationality or club, and one slot that must be a set position.

Today's blockerNo French players

Position slotSlot 3 must be a defender

START

Wayne Rooney
#2

Cristiano Ronaldo

Manchester United
#3

Sergio Ramos

Real Madrid

Defender
#4

?
#5

?

Karim Benzema

Blocked

Players with nationality "France" can't be picked today.

Five players. Three lives.

Use a different club for every link. Stuck? A hint shows a player's clubs, at a cost.

START

Today's player

revealed on play
#2

?
#3

?

Position
#4

?
#5

?

3lives

5:00on the clock

30sper miss or hint

How to play

Build a chain of 5 players from the start player, each pick must be a genuine teammate, same squad at the same time.
Each day has a blocker (banned nationality or club) and one position slot. Press Go to reveal them and start the clock.
You're racing a 5-minute countdown, the more time left when you finish, the higher your score. Reach zero and your run ends.
You have 3 lives, a wrong guess costs one and 30 seconds off the clock. Lose all three and your run ends too.
Stuck? Hint shows that player's clubs and years, for 30 seconds. Complete the chain to score off the clock plus a 200-point completion bonus, but giving up, running out of lives, running out of time, or a dead end still banks you 50 points per correct pick made that day, so you're never left with a flat 0.

Example: current player is Frank Lampard, type "Terry" and John Terry is accepted, they were Chelsea teammates.

Scoring

Your score counts down from the start as the clock runs, the quicker you finish, the more you keep. A hint or a wrong guess each take 30 seconds off your clock, same as if time had actually passed. Complete the chain and you get that countdown score plus a 200-point completion bonus (50 for each correct pick). Don't finish? Giving up, running out of lives, running out of time, or a dead end still bank you 50 points for every correct pick you made, just no time bonus, no completion bonus.

What's new

11 October

A proper front page, a new look, and a crest of our own. History has moved to its own page with a Your Stats panel above it: games played, best score, the players you pick most and your longest streak.

9 October

Play a day you missed. Any puzzle from 19 September up to two days ago can be caught up on, one attempt each. A late score is kept and shown against that day's average, marked "late", and it does not touch the day's stats or your streak. History also shows the best score anyone posted on each day, and lights the row gold on days you posted it.

1 October

The puzzle now changes at midnight where you are, rather than at midnight UTC. Your streak counts puzzles rather than dates, so it survives travelling.

29 September

A rebuilt result screen, and a Today on Fives panel showing the crowd's most popular opening pick and how unusual your own chain was.

About & data

Fives is a daily football puzzle. Chain five real players, where each pair genuinely played together at the same club at the same time. It is in beta, so the rules and the scoring may still change.

Player and club data comes from Wikidata. It is not complete. Appearance records and whole club spells are missing for some players, so a connection you know is real is sometimes not recognised. Reporting one is the quickest way it gets fixed.

Flag graphics by Twemoji, licensed CC-BY 4.0. Player photographs from Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia, under their respective licences.

Privacy

No account, no login, and no cookies used to track you.

Your games, scores, streak and history are kept in this browser and nowhere else. They are never sent to us and we cannot see them. Clearing your browsing data for this site will erase them.

What we do record is counts. How many people played a puzzle, how those games ended, and how often each player was picked. They are daily totals with no identifiers, no timestamps, and nothing tying any game to any person.

Our host, Render, keeps standard server logs that include visitor IP addresses. Traffic figures come from Cloudflare's cookie-free, anonymised analytics. No data is sold or shared.