Extraplot is a free daily chart game about real data. Each round gives you a chart that stops at a marked year and asks one question: where did the line go next? You draw your best guess of the missing years, the real line appears over your drawing, and you score up to 1,000 points for that chart. Five charts make a day, so a perfect day is 5,000.
That is the whole idea. You are not asked to name a country or remember a number — you are asked to read a trend and commit to a shape before the answer appears. The game is quick enough for a coffee break, free, and playable on a phone or a laptop without an account.
What actually happens in a round
- Read the chart. The title is a question, the unit is on the axis, and the real line runs up to a dashed cut-off year.
- Draw the rest. Drag or tap across the shaded side to set a value for every hidden year; the line starts at the last real point.
- Ink it in. The true line appears with the score, your average miss, the two house baselines and a short note on what happened and why.
- Repeat five times. The set runs from two warm-ups through two medium charts to one bold call. Your day is the total out of 5,000.
See the full rules and the exact scoring curve for the details, or the daily format guide for the reset, streaks and archive.
How the scoring works, briefly
A chart's score depends on the average gap between your drawn line and the real line across the hidden years, measured against the chart's height. If your average miss is 1% of the chart height or less, you get the full 1,000. The score falls steadily to zero by a 31% average miss. The formula rewards the whole shape of your guess, so getting the direction and the endpoint right matters more than nailing one noisy year.
You also see what two lazy lines — holding the last value flat, and carrying the recent trend straight on — would have scored. The build rejects charts where either of those would score well, which is why every chart has something to say. Beat both on all five charts of a day and you earn the House Beater badge.
Where the charts come from
Every chart is built from a public dataset: country series from the World Bank and Our World in Data, US Social Security baby-name records, Wikimedia pageviews, and carefully sourced industry figures for culture, tech and money. Each reveal credits the exact dataset and licence, because the point is to learn what actually happened — not to guess a made-up line.
The first season is 365 days, starting 12 November 2026, with 1,825 unique charts. No chart repeats. Every day mixes categories and difficulty, and the archive keeps every past set playable for free.
Why draw first?
Reading a finished chart is easy to forget. Drawing a line before the answer appears forces you to commit to a belief — about a trend, a limit, a shock — and the reveal then tells you exactly how good that belief was. That is the part that sticks, and it is why the predict-then-reveal format works as a daily habit rather than a one-off article.
Extraplot adds the things a one-off interactive cannot: a new five-chart set every day, a scoring rule that is fair across very different units, a difficulty ladder, a streak, and an archive. It is an independent game, not affiliated with The New York Times, GuessDash or any data provider.
Free, private and on any device
Extraplot is free and needs no account. Your scores, streak, badges and settings live in your browser's local storage and are never uploaded. There are no ads; the only third-party tags are Google Analytics 4 (via Google Tag Manager) and Cloudflare Web Analytics, used for aggregate traffic measurement without receiving your scores or drawings. Fonts and icons are served from the site itself. It runs in any modern desktop or mobile browser, supports keyboard play and screen readers, and respects reduced-motion settings.