BLEACHER BRAWLS

How to play Bleacher Brawls

Bleacher Brawls is a set of free MLB and NBA trivia games built from real player stats and real box scores. There are two kinds of game, and every one of them works without an account.

Mystery-player games

In Name That Player Trivia and Career Path, for both MLB and the NBA, a mystery player is hidden behind a handful of clues. You pick a team and an era, and the player is someone who played for that team in that era. The first clues are free. The rest stay hidden until you reveal them, and each one adds a time penalty to your score.

  • Guesses: you get up to nine per round, and a Give up button appears after three.
  • Scoring: your score is your time in seconds plus 5, 10 and 15 seconds for the first, second and third extra clue you reveal. Lower is better, and wrong guesses don’t add time.
  • Eras: MLB puzzles use 2000–present, 1974–1999, 1947–1973 and 1903–1946. NBA puzzles use 2000–present, 1980–1999 and 1960–1979. A player’s era is set by the year his time with that team began.

Box score games

MLB Box Score Starting 9s and NBA Box Score Top 5s show a real box score with every name hidden. You choose a team, a season and a game, then fill in who played. Easy mode accepts players in any order, Medium asks you to place your own team’s players in order, and Hard asks for both teams. There’s no clock in these games.

Practice, daily and Around the League

  • Practice puzzles are available any time. You won’t see the same player twice until you’ve been through every eligible player for that team and era.
  • Daily Challenge gives every team one shared Career Path puzzle each day, the same for everyone, in both MLB and the NBA. Signed-in players get one scored attempt per puzzle.
  • Around the League is a race: solve every team’s daily puzzle on the same day to make the board, ranked by order of completion and by combined time.

Accounts, guests and leaderboards

You can play everything as a guest. Creating a free account saves your scores and lets you appear on leaderboards under your username. Your email address is used only to sign in and to reset your password. Read more in our privacy policy.

Sharing your result

When you finish a puzzle you can share it with a friend. The message includes the team, your time and your number of guesses, but never the answer, so you won’t spoil it for them.

Game guides

Each game has its own guide with the full rules and some tips.

Where the data comes from

Baseball stats come from the official MLB Stats API and basketball stats come from BALLDONTLIE. Bleacher Brawls is an independent fan project and isn’t affiliated with MLB, the NBA or any team. You can read more about the site.