Chain Gang is a free, independent football trivia game built for fans who know players, not just teams. Every day there is a new puzzle: connect two NFL players through the teams, jersey numbers and colleges they share, in as few links as possible.
Play today's chainFootball fans argue about who played where and who wore what. Chain Gang turns that knowledge into a short daily game that rewards cleverness over memorisation. A perfect chain is not the obvious one through team rosters; it usually runs through a college or an unexpected jersey number.
The Daily puzzle is picked by hand. Each pair of players is checked so that they have no direct link, so the player has to find a route, and so that the route takes at least two moves. Puzzles are reviewed and approved before the day they run. Freeplay matchups are generated automatically with the same rules.
The roster covers players from the league's early decades to the present. It is built from the open nflverse data project (licensed CC BY 4.0), which publishes historical NFL rosters, and it is refreshed automatically every day so that new players and team changes appear without manual work. Colleges and numbers are normalised so that spelling variants are treated as one school or one number. Data this large is never perfect; if you spot an error, please tell us.
There are no accounts and no sign-up. Your game progress stays on your own device. The site may show advertising to help pay for hosting. Read the privacy policy for details.
Bug reports, corrections, ideas and general feedback are all welcome. Use the feedback form, or email thechainganggame@gmail.com.
Chain Gang is an unofficial fan project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by the National Football League, any team, or any player. Team and player names are used only to identify factual career information.