How to Play The Chains: MLB

The Chains: MLB is a daily baseball connection puzzle. Every day gives you a new Start player and a new Finish player, and the job is to build a chain of real MLB players that connects one to the other, using only the connections the league itself created.

The basics

Connect the Start player to the Finish player. Each consecutive pair in the chain (each “link”) must share an MLB team, in any season. Type a name, pick from the suggestions, and keep building. The moment a legal pick connects to the Finish, the chain auto-completes: you never add the Finish player by hand. The full player pool covers every MLB player who appeared in a regular-season game from 1969 to today.

Today's objective

Each day's puzzle carries one objective, stated in plain text above the chain. There are a few kinds:

Position objective (“Every player must be a shortstop”) — every player in the chain, Start, Finish, and everyone between, must fit the stated position.
Team waypoint (“Your chain must pass through a Yankees player”) — any valid chain works, but at least one connector (not Start or Finish) must match. The detour is real: par is set longer than the free shortest path to account for it.
Country waypoint (“Your chain must include a player born in the Dominican Republic”) — same detour rule, matched on birth country instead of team.
Stat-milestone waypoint (“Your chain must include a player with a 40+ home run season”) — matched against real career or single-season stat lines.
Award waypoint (“Your chain must include an MVP winner”) — matched against real award history.

Scoring

Base score is 1000 at par. Every link past par costs −300, down to a floor of 100. A wrong guess costs −50. If no legal move toward the Finish remains, the chain restarts at −150.

Every connector (not Start or Finish) also adds a rarity bonus on top of the base score, based on its tier, summed across the whole chain:

Common0Uncommon+40Rare+90Epic+160Legendary+250Ball-knower+400Unicorn+600

Each connector also adds a small precision bonus (up to +50) based on exactly how rare that specific player is within their tier, so two Rare pulls almost never score identically.

Rarity tiers

Rarity isn't about how famous a player is in general. It's about how surprising it is that you named this person for this specific connection, compared to everyone else who could've legally filled that same spot. Rarity is revealed after each pick, as the card's finish:

Commonan obvious pick, most fans land here

Uncommonsolid, no hesitation

Raretook a beat to place

Epica real deep cut for that connection

Legendarymost people wouldn't have found this

Ball-knowerborderline nobody sees this coming

Unicorna true 1-of-1, practically no one gets here

Hard mode

Hard mode is its own daily puzzle, separate from the normal board. Links require true teammates: a shared MLB team in the same season, not just the same franchise at any point in history. There's no stated objective, just the shortest legal path across a much deeper graph. Hard mode has its own once-per-day lock and streak, tracked separately from normal mode.

Streaks

Each puzzle resets at midnight Eastern and can only be played once per day per mode; that day's locked result is what counts toward your streak and today's score. Current streak is your run of consecutive solved days; best streak is the longest run you've ever put together. Replaying a solved puzzle in Unlimited mode, or using a hint, is practice only, it never touches your streak.