How to win Career Arc

Career Arc gives you one real player, one stat, and an empty chart with their seasons along the bottom. You draw the whole career, season by season, and then watch the real line draw in over yours. The closer your line runs to it, the more of the 1,000 points you keep.

Draw the shape before the numbers

Almost every career has the same story: a start, a rise, a peak, and a fade. Before you draw anything, decide what that story was for this player. When did they become a regular? When were they at their best? Did they fade slowly or stop suddenly?

The shape matters more than you’d think. In our testing, a flat line at the player’s career average keeps only about 350 points in baseball and football, and around 470 in basketball, where careers run flatter. That’s not quite a win. The shape is what gets you over the line.

How the scoring works

The game measures how far your line is from the real one in each season, averages that, and compares it to the player’s best season. Being 10 homers off matters more for a 30-homer hitter than for a 60-homer one.

Because it’s an average over every season, one wild miss isn’t a disaster. Getting the peak season exactly right is worth much less than getting the general level right across the whole career.

The rookie season is usually low

Most players start small. A September call-up, a rookie coming off the bench, a teenager getting a few appearances. Their first season on the chart is often a fraction of their peak, and so is the second. Start your line low and let it climb.

The exceptions are players who arrived as stars, usually top draft picks in basketball and football. If the player was a sensation from day one, draw it that way.

Watch for shortened seasons

Some seasons were cut short by strikes, lockouts or the pandemic, and the chart shades them. For stats counted as season totals, these seasons will dip, even for a player at their peak. The ones you’ll see most:

• Baseball 2020: 60 games instead of 162. A 40-homer hitter might have 15.
• Hockey 2012–13: 48 games, after a lockout.
• Hockey 2019–20 and 2020–21: cut short and then shortened by the pandemic.

Basketball is drawn per game, so lockouts and missed games don’t dent the line. A player who missed half a season still shows their per-game level for the games they played.

Use the career total

The game shows the player’s career number as a hint. In baseball, football, hockey and soccer, that’s the total of every season on the chart. Divide it by the number of seasons and you have the average your line should be built around. Then draw the peak above it and the early and late seasons below it.

Injuries and comebacks

A season lost to injury shows as a dip, or a gap if the player didn’t play at all. If you remember a player missing most of a season, draw it. It’s one of the few details that can earn you real points over a smooth curve.