Redacted Maps

Redacted Maps takes a choropleth map and redacts the title. Everything else is there: the color gradient, the Low and High legend, the hatched No Data areas, and a UNIT label that displays [CLASSIFIED] in red. It’s up to you to say what the map measures. Each map is numbered, and every area it covers is filled with a shade ranging from dark to light according to its value.

1. Read the map first: shape of the gradient, regional blocks of color, and especially the hatched areas that signal missing data.
2. Spend your three "peek" uses by tapping an area to see the data it hides (the counter at the top shows how many you have left).
3. Type your guess in the "What does this map show?" field and confirm with the ▶ arrow.
4. Each mistake unlocks a level of help: the unit after one error, the category after two, a hint after three.
5. The final guess is multiple-choice: four intercepted answers, one authentic.

It’s a reverse chart-reading game, and it’s rarer than it seems. The pleasure is not geographic but statistical: recognizing in a gradient a story of climate, economy, or demography, with the little theatre of a declassified file that makes deduction less textbook.

Feedback is a progressive unmasking rather than hot-and-cold. As long as you haven’t missed, the unit remains marked [CLASSIFIED]; successive mistakes first reveal that unit, then the data category, then a written hint, before switching to a final multiple-choice. The "peeks" form a separate channel: they don’t judge your guess, they open the hidden data of an area.

Map of the day

One map per day at midnight, numbered. The header carries a country label such as "🇺🇸 US."

• Save your three "peeks" for the extremes of the gradient: the data hidden under the darkest area and under the lightest area says more than one taken in the middle.
• The No Data hatching is a clue in itself: a dataset that omits certain territories often betrays its producer and its collection method.
• The color scale is much more readable than the map itself. A gradient concentrated in a single region tells a different story than a gradient spread from one coast to the other.