The daily chart game · Day 1 · 2026-11-12
Extraplot is the daily chart game where a real line stops at a cut-off year. Nobody shows you what happened next — you draw it, then the true line inks in. The closer your stroke, the more you score.
What is Extraplot?
Extraplot is a free daily game about real data. You are not asked to name a country or recall a year: you draw the missing half of a chart and find out how well you read the world.
Every day, five charts from real records — birth rates, baby names, video-game sales, Wikipedia lookups, electricity use, ticket prices — are cut off at a certain year. The line stops. The rest of the chart is a shaded blank. You draw your best guess of where the line went, from the cut-off year all the way to the last year on the axis. Hit reveal and the real line inks in over yours, with a short note on what happened and a link to the source.
It is the You Draw It idea — made famous by The New York Times’ chart-drawing feature — turned into a five-minute daily game you can play on a phone, with a score, a streak and a spoiler-free result to share.
Real data only
Each chart comes from public records — the World Bank, Our World in Data, US Social Security name data, Wikimedia pageviews, industry reports. The reveal credits the exact dataset and licence, because the point is to learn what actually happened.
Draw first
A line you recognise is a line you can predict backwards. Drawing first forces an honest guess, and the reveal is the moment you find out which of your instincts about the world were right. That is the whole game.
How a round works
No timer, no account, no penalty for taking your time. The clock only matters if you want to catch the next day’s set.
Title, unit and the line so far. The cut-off is marked in dashes.
Drag across the shaded side, or tap a year. Your line starts at the last real point.
Draw over a stretch to redo it, or undo a whole stroke. Arrow keys work too.
The real line appears with the story, the source and your average miss.
Warm-ups first, bold calls last. Your day is the total out of 5,000.
Scoring
Each chart is scored on the average gap between your line and the real one, as a share of the chart’s height. No single lucky year carries you: it is the whole shape that scores.
Before a chart goes into the game, our build scores the two easiest ways to fake it: a flat line that holds the last real value, and the recent trend carried straight on. If either would score above 450, the chart is rejected and replaced. Every Extraplot chart has something to say.
On reveal you also see what those two lazy lines would have scored. Out-draw the house on all five charts and the day counts as a House Beater — a badge for your logbook and a fine thing to mention to nobody in particular.
In the series
The season cycles through seven corners of the archive. You will never get the same chart twice, and every day mixes the serious with the ridiculous.
Countries, populations and the numbers that shape everyday life.
How baby names rise, peak and fall out of fashion.
What the world looked up on Wikipedia, and when.
Films, music, games and the things we watched together.
Products, platforms and inventions with a steep learning curve.
Climate, energy, wildlife and a changing planet.
Prices, sales and industries, from vinyl to video calls.
Why draw first?
In 2015, The New York Times asked readers to draw how a child’s chance of college changed with their parents’ income — before showing the real line. The revealed line was almost straight, rising with every step. Drawing first made readers feel the surprise.
Extraplot adds the parts a newspaper feature cannot: a new set of five charts every day, a scoring curve that rewards the whole shape of your guess, warm-ups before the bold calls, a house line to beat, a streak to keep, and an archive of every past set if you missed a day.
You can read the full rules, browse the archive, or start with the daily chart game guide. When you are ready, the first chart is one tap away.
Quick answers
The average gap between your drawn line and the real line, measured against the chart’s height. A miss of about 1% of the chart height or less scores the full 1,000. An average miss of about a third of the chart scores nothing. Five charts make a day, so a perfect day is 5,000.
No. Scores, streaks and badges live in your browser’s local storage. There is no sign-up, no email, no tracking of your drawings.
Yes — every aired day stays playable in the archive, free. Practice mode draws random charts from the whole season, including ones that have not aired yet.
Public datasets: the World Bank, Our World in Data, US Social Security baby-name records, Wikimedia pageviews and published industry figures. Each chart links to its source and shows the values at reveal, so you can check our work.
Free, no sign-up, about five minutes. The first one is a warm-up.
Keep exploring
Guides, archives and the thinking behind the game — all free, in your browser, no account needed.
A plain-English explainer for first-time visitors, in about a minute.
What makes Extraplot a daily habit, and how the five-chart set works.
The chart-drawing format, its history, and where Extraplot takes it.
Daily puzzle games for people who like one shared challenge a day.
How to read a trend well enough to beat the house line.