Daily games

• Higher or Lower

  10 rounds

  Which Canadian city has more people?

  Ten rounds, two cities each. Pick the one with the larger population. The pairs get closer together as you go, so the last few are genuinely hard.

• The Daily Five

  5 questions

  Five questions about your city

  Five multiple-choice questions drawn from the same sourced data as the reference pages: census counts, climate normals, air quality bands, transit operators and provincial rules.

• How Far?

  5 rounds

  Guess the distance between two Canadian cities

  Five pairs of cities from across the country. Guess the straight-line distance in kilometres and score on how close you get. Being out by a little on a long trip still scores well; being out by a lot on a short one does not.

Why daily puzzles

A reference page is something you read once. A daily puzzle is something you come back to, because the answer changes at midnight and everybody playing Winnipeg is looking at the same set of questions. That combination — one puzzle a day, the same for everyone — is what makes a result worth comparing with a friend, and it is the whole reason these exist.

There is no account, no leaderboard and no tracking. Your streak is kept in your own browser and nothing about your play is sent to us. Clearing your browser data clears your streak, and that is the entire cost of not having a login.

Where the questions come from

Every question, every option and every answer is generated from data the site already publishes, rather than written by hand. That constraint is deliberate and it cuts both ways: the games can never ask something we cannot answer, and a wrong answer is a bug rather than a matter of opinion.

• Population figures are the 2021 Census of Population from Statistics Canada, table 98-10-0002, covering two hundred Canadian municipalities of 20,000 people or more.
• Climate answers are the 1981–2010 normals from each city’s official Environment Canada station.
• Air quality bands are the official AQHI health risk categories from Environment Canada.
• Provincial questions come from the government pages behind each province’s health plan, driver licensing, tenancy rules, insurance regime and statutory holidays.
• Distances are great-circle distances computed from city coordinates with the haversine formula.

Playing fairly

These are single-player puzzles with no stakes, so there is nothing to cheat at except your own streak. That said, the answers for the day are computed on the server and sent to your browser, which means a determined person could read them out of the page source. We have not obfuscated them, because doing so would make the pages slower and more fragile for everybody in order to protect a score that nobody is competing over.