Roster Relay

Roster Relay hands you two players and asks you to walk from one to the other through shared locker rooms. Two men link when they appeared for the same franchise in the same season, which the game demonstrates with its own example line across the top: Derek Jeter to Mariano Rivera works because both appeared for the Yankees in 1998. The board stacks a START card, a dotted gap holding a link chip marked with three question marks, and a FINISH card, each card wearing chips for the teams and years that player covered. Tabs in the header swing the whole thing between MLB, NBA and NFL.

1. Type a player into the box under the board and press ADD. The prompt spells out the requirement: someone who shared a franchise and a season with the START player.
2. Read the connector that appears. The dark bar names the shared team season that made the link legal, and the chips on the new card show his roster history so you can aim the next hop.
3. Keep chaining. The link counter at the bottom of the board tracks how long your route has become.
4. Close it out when FINISH turns gold, which the rules say happens once you can link to it directly, or keep going to build more rarity.

The clever part is that finishing is easy and finishing well is not. Any decent fan can bridge two players through a superstar who played everywhere, and the game will happily accept it, then show you a rarity bar of almost nothing. Hiding that number until after you commit is what keeps this a game rather than a lookup exercise, and the line under the footer, games for people who read the footnotes, is an honest description of who it is aimed at.

Wrong guesses are free, so the game never punishes a miss. What it scores instead is obscurity. Every player you add gets a gold rarity bar, hidden while you search and revealed only after you commit, with higher numbers meaning a less recognisable name. Average Rarity averages the qualifying players you added and Total Rarity adds them together, while START, FINISH and repeated rosters score nothing at all. The rules say rarity is estimated from All-Star selections and career data.

MLB

The default tab, headed MLB, DAILY TEAMMATE CHAIN. The footer credits the MLB Stats API for the data.

NBA

A header tab that switches the chain to basketball.

NFL

A header tab that switches the chain to football.

Play a prior puzzle

A link in the puzzle header for earlier days.

• You cannot shop for obscurity. Rarity stays hidden in the search box and only appears once the player is locked into the chain, so the only lever you have is your own hunch about who is forgettable.
• The team chips under each card are the real planning tool. A well travelled journeyman opens far more routes than a franchise legend who wore one shirt his whole career.
• Watch the data window. The rules cover 1990 through the completed 2025 season and exclude ongoing seasons, so a bridge built on the 1980s will not resolve.
• Reaching FINISH is not the end of the scoring. Once its row turns gold you can still extend the route, and the rules say repeated rosters simply do not score.