Daily games work because of a constraint: everyone plays the same puzzle on the same day. There is nothing to grind, no ladder to climb and no way to be far behind. You show up, do one small hard thing, and compare notes with whoever else showed up.
Extraplot applies that constraint to charts. A real data series is cut off at a real year. The years after the cut-off are blank. You draw where you think the line went, ink it in, and find out. Then you do it four more times.
Why five charts, not one
A single chart a day is too fragile a format: one chart you happen to know, or one you happen to hate, decides your whole day. Five charts give the set a rhythm — a warm-up you can reason through, two middles where history helps but bends, and a bold call at the end.
Five is also about five minutes. The set is designed to fit in a coffee break without ever feeling rushed. There is no timer, and you can stop after two charts and resume later if life gets in the way.
One reset, one world
The day turns over at midnight Eastern Time, not at your local midnight. That is a deliberate choice: a single global reset means the charts are genuinely shared. When someone in another country talks about “today's hard one”, they are talking about the same chart you played.
The side effect is that the reset lands at an awkward hour depending on where you live. The site shows a countdown to the next reset in ET, and keeps today's set available for the whole ET day, so nobody loses a set to a timezone accident. If you have already finished today's set, the countdown is simply when the next one arrives.
| Where you are | When the reset feels like a reset |
|---|---|
| US East Coast | midnight |
| US West Coast | 9pm |
| United Kingdom | 5am |
| Central Europe | 6am |
| India | 10:30am |
| Japan | 2pm |
| Australia (Sydney) | 4pm |
The streak
Finishing today's set extends your streak. The streak is a nudge, not a trap: it counts consecutive days, it is stored in your browser, and there is no punishment for breaking it beyond the number changing. Archive runs and practice mode deliberately do not touch it.
Streaks are personal in Extraplot. There is no public leaderboard, no live race and no ranking of strangers' drawings. The result screen gives you a spoiler-free summary to share with friends if you want to, and a challenge link if you want to compare one specific day against someone you know.
The archive, and why the answer stays playable
Every day that has aired becomes a permanent archive set. Miss a day, miss a month, or discover the game in the middle of the season: the old sets are still there, still scored the same way, still free.
The archive is also the best practice tool in the game. Daily sets are a fixed sequence, so you cannot choose your weak category. Archive runs let you replay a day you did badly, or work through a month of one kind of chart. Nothing you do in the archive changes your daily total or your streak.
What a daily season looks like
The first season is 365 days, starting 12 November 2026. Each day uses five charts from a bank of 1,825 unique real-data series, and no chart is repeated across the season. The mix is deliberate: about a third of the charts are country-level world data, with the rest spread across names, Wikipedia search trends, culture, tech, nature and money. A single day never repeats a category and never gives you more than one name chart or one search chart.
Because the charts come from published data, the reveal always has a source. Charts about the past can teach you something you did not know; charts that cut off close to the present are the ones where your guess is a genuine forecast.
Practice, challenge and deep links
There are more ways to play than the daily set. Practice draws a random set from the season without touching your streak. Challenge links let you send a specific day to a friend and compare scores at the end. And every archived day has its own link, so you can start a game from a message, a bookmark or a browser tab — the game resumes exactly where you left it.
How to get the most out of a daily habit
- Play at roughly the same time each day; the five-chart set becomes a ritual rather than a task.
- Read the reveal even when you scored badly. The note is the part that makes the next chart easier.
- Do not look up the data before drawing. The whole game is the gap between what you think and what happened.
- Keep the archive for the days you want more. Two or three extra charts on a slow evening is a good way to learn a category.
- Share the result line, not spoilers. Half the pleasure for a friend is finding out for themselves.