Nasty

Nasty is a variant on the general Countdown game which is played on Apterous.

During Episode S26, a special episode between the 2009 series champions Chris Davies and Kirk Bevins, the usual large numbers were replaced with the "nasty" alternatives 12, 37, 62 and 87 (the latter two revealed during Episode S29, assuming they were the same in both episodes). Ironically, the use of the "nasty" large numbers statistically increases by some margin the likelihood that games will be solvable.

The numbers format was used for the two Numberists specials on ZoomDown.

Letters rounds

The letters round is as normal, but the most common letter in the relevant language will not appear in the selections. This means E in English (including CSW), French, Dutch, and German; A in Spanish and Portuguese; Α (alpha) in Greek; I in Italian and Finnish; D in Welsh; И in Russian; and י in Hebrew. Scoring is also said to be "nasty", as it is done by Gevin scoring, so nine-letter words are worth nine points instead of 18.

Numbers rounds

As explained above, in the numbers round, the large numbers are 12, 37, 62 and 87 rather than 25, 50, 75 and 100.

Conundrums

In the conundrum round, any nine letter word (except those with anagrams) may be used, including very obscure words, plurals and so forth. There is a special item for solving these exceptional conundrums.