About Rankd

A daily game of surprising stats. Rank the stats.

Rankd is a free daily puzzle game built on real numbers. Every day there is one new puzzle, and everyone gets the same one. Most of us carry around a picture of the world made of headlines, jokes and old assumptions: which countries drink the most, where people live longest, who works the longest hours, which groups vote which way. Rankd asks you to put that picture to the test. Sometimes your gut is right. Often it isn't, and that moment of "wait, really?" is the whole point.

Three ways to play

• Rank it: put five or six countries or groups in order, from highest to lowest, using the real values shown beside the cards. You get five tries, and right answers lock in place as you go.
• Guess the top 5: name the five countries at the top of a list (say, the biggest tea drinkers) from every country with data. You can miss ten times, and hints appear as you go.
• Match it: match four to seven clues to the right person or country. The clues are true, sourced and often hard to believe.
• Tier it: drop countries onto labeled tiers when several share the same value (for example Pew religion mentions). Right tiers lock green; you get five tries.

There is also a Practice mode that deals random puzzles from the full datasets, and an Archive of every past daily puzzle. See How to play for the details.

A daily game of surprising stats

Rankd is built around the gap between what people expect and what the data says. Puzzles are picked because the real order tends to surprise people: a country you'd expect at the top lands near the bottom, or two neighbours you'd assume are alike turn out to be far apart. Some puzzles touch sensitive subjects such as crime, health, religion or politics. Those carry a short caveat about what the numbers do and don't measure, and they are spaced out in the schedule so no two land on consecutive days. The aim is to make you curious about the real numbers, not to confirm or invent a stereotype.

Where the numbers come from

Every value in Rankd comes from a real, cited source, and every puzzle links to it. We use official and well-known datasets: the World Health Organization, the World Bank, the UN (UNODC, FAO), Our World in Data, national statistics offices, government reports, peer-reviewed studies and large published surveys. The rules we follow:

• No invented, estimated or "about right" numbers. If a figure can't be sourced, it isn't in the game.
• The source, the year and what is being measured are shown with the answer. Where a measure has a known weakness (self-reported surveys, small samples, different definitions between countries), the caveat says so.
• Values that are too close to call are not used as the deciding gap in a puzzle, so the answer never hinges on rounding.
• Clues in Match it are fact-checked against the linked source and never give away the answer's country.

Spotted a mistake or an outdated figure? Please tell us (see Contact below). Corrections are welcome and we fix them.

Who makes Rankd

Rankd is made by Michael Yao, creator of @mikelyaps on Instagram and TikTok, where he makes videos about surprising statistics.

Contact

Questions, corrections or ideas: mikelyaps@gmail.com.

Rankd is free to play and is supported by ads. Read our privacy policy to see how that works.