About Geopolitix
Geopolitix is a free daily country-ranking game and an atlas of the data it is played on. It is made by one person, Eliott Gandiolle, an independent developer based in Paris. There is no company behind it, no investors and no editorial team: when this page says “we” it means one developer and a build script.
What the game is
Every day at midnight, local time, the same puzzle is published for everyone: 5 rounds, of which 3 ask you to drag 5 countries into the right order for a single real-world statistic, from GDP and population to alcohol drunk, hours worked, Olympic medals and how much people say they trust each other. The two closing rounds ask for a country by other means: one from a photograph of one of its monuments, one from a pin on a blank map.
Locking in a ranking reveals the true figures and links the source. You can score up to 900 points a day, and the result shares as a colour-coded grid. No account, no sign-up, no download, no guess limit, and the same puzzle for every player on a given day, so scores are actually comparable.
Who makes it
Eliott Gandiolle, an independent developer in Paris, France. I build a small family of free daily games (Geopolitix, DailyGeo, GeoMemory, DailyMetro) in my own time. I write the code, assemble the datasets, draw the pixel icons and write the articles in the atlas. The formal publisher details, as French law requires them, are on the legal notice.
I am not a geographer, an economist or a statistician, and this site is not a research output. It is a game built carefully on other people's published data, which is why the sourcing below matters more than my opinion does.
Where the numbers come from
Every figure on this site comes from a named public dataset: the World Bank for GDP, population, life expectancy, rainfall and forest cover; Our World in Data for alcohol, calories, working hours, meat, height, divorce and trust; the WHO for depression and tobacco; Eurostat for the age people leave home; The Economist for the Big Mac index; and Wikipedia for the Olympic and Paralympic medal tables and tea consumption.
The source and the year of the data are printed under every table and on every reveal in the game, and each links back to the original. There is no in-between step where a number gets retyped: the 33 rankings are read out of the dataset when the site is built, so a page cannot quote a figure the game no longer plays, and the atlas and the board can never disagree.
Countries with no published figure for a statistic are left out of that ranking rather than shown as zero, which is why the tables have different lengths. The number of countries actually ranked is stated at the top of each one.
How the daily puzzle is generated
The day is derived from the date alone, with no clock and no randomness at play time, so everyone in the world gets the same 5 rounds. Within a round, the 5 countries are drawn with two constraints: a familiarity weighting, so widely known countries carry most days and obscure ones are rare guests, and a spread rule, so the five are far enough apart on the metric to be ordered by reasoning rather than by luck.
Once a day has been served it is pinned to a file and never redrawn. A later change to the data or the criteria cannot rewrite a puzzle somebody has already played.
What this site does not claim
Geopolitix is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the World Bank, Our World in Data, the WHO, Eurostat, The Economist or the Wikimedia Foundation. Their data is used under its own terms and credited on every page that uses it.
A ranking is only ever as good as the survey behind it, and several of these are worse than they look. Self-reported figures (alcohol, trust, hours worked) carry a reporting bias that varies by country. Comparisons across very different statistical systems are approximate. A country at the bottom of a table is not necessarily doing badly: the bottom of the obesity table mixes places with healthy diets and places where undernourishment is the real problem, which is the sort of thing the notes under each table try to say out loud rather than leave to the reader.
If you find an error, tell me and I will fix it or say why I have not. Corrections are the only feedback that changes the site the same week.
How it is paid for
Geopolitix is free and always has been. Running costs are covered by third-party advertising and by entirely voluntary donations. Nothing is sold to players, there is no paid tier and no feature is withheld from anyone. What data is and is not collected, and what the advertising does with cookies, is set out in full on the privacy page.
Contact
Corrections, questions, press, or a note about a country that is ranked wrongly: write to dailymetrolive@gmail.com and it reaches me directly. There is no support team and no ticket system, so replies are personal and occasionally slow.