How to play Tradle — a free daily geography guessing game

Tradle takes a simple, addictive idea — every country has an economic fingerprint you can read off its exports — and turns it into a daily puzzle. There is a new country every day, shared by everyone, so you can compare notes with friends. When the daily puzzle is done, an unlimited practice mode serves up a fresh country whenever you want more, so the game never runs out.

Three things set the tone. First, it is free — there is no paywall and no premium upsell. Second, it asks for no account: your streak and statistics live in your own browser, so you can start the moment the page loads without handing over an email address. Third, the interface is quiet — a clean treemap, a tidy guess history and a result you can copy as plain text, with zero emoji anywhere in the experience.

It is built to be read by everyone. Each guess row shows its clues as text as well as colour — the distance in kilometres, a compass label such as NE, and a proximity percentage — so the feedback never depends on colour alone. The treemap renders before any script runs, so it works on a slow connection and is fully keyboard-operable.

The day’s country is the same for every player and rolls over at midnight in your own time zone. Solve it and your streak ticks up; come back tomorrow to keep it alive. When you finish, you can copy a type-set result as plain text — a row of shaded blocks for each guess, without naming the country — and paste it to friends. Because there is no timer, nobody is pushed to rush; the game rewards a careful read of the map over raw speed.

The goal is to identify a hidden country from its export treemap in six guesses. The treemap is a proportional map of the country’s goods exports: each coloured block is a category of merchandise — crude petroleum, cars, integrated circuits, coffee, gold and so on — sized by its share of the total. The biggest blocks are the clearest clue to what kind of economy you are looking at.

Type any real country, pick it from the suggestion list and press Guess. Unless you have found the answer, every guess comes back with three pieces of feedback that, read together, walk you toward the right country:

Distance tells you how far off you are, but not which way. Direction supplies the missing bearing: an arrow pointing north-east with the label NE means the answer lies north-east of your guess. Proximity is a quick warmer-or-colder read that climbs to 100% when you land on the country. A guess of, say, France that comes back 1,200 km · SE · 61% is telling you the answer is a moderately close country to France’s south-east.

A few details are worth knowing. Each country can only be guessed once. Naming the country on an earlier row builds your daily streak, but there is no penalty for using the practice mode, which serves an endless run of countries. And because there is no timer, Tradle rewards careful reading of the map and clean triangulation over speed — after six guesses, if you have not found it, the answer is revealed.

Suppose the day’s treemap is dominated by a single huge block, with a couple of smaller ones alongside it:

That mix is unmistakable: nearly three-quarters of everything this country ships abroad is oil and gas, and almost nothing is manufactured. This is a major petroleum exporter, which points squarely at the Gulf, West Africa, or a handful of others. A sensible first guess is the biggest, best-known oil economy in the frame — say Saudi Arabia.

Imagine that guess comes back 1,500 km · SE · 74%. Read it slowly. The proximity of 74% says you are warm, so you are in the right neighbourhood; the distance of 1,500 km says you are close but not there; and the SE bearing says the answer lies to Saudi Arabia’s south-east. Oil, close to Saudi Arabia, to the south-east — that describes a smaller Gulf state like the United Arab Emirates or Oman. Guess the United Arab Emirates next and the proximity leaps toward 100%. If it is not an exact hit, the fresh distance and bearing nudge you the last step onto the answer.

That is the whole loop in miniature: read the treemap to pick the region, spend a guess to get a bearing, then let distance and direction carry you home. You almost never need to know a country’s exact exports — you just need to recognise the type of economy and then triangulate.

Tradle belongs to a family of daily “guess the country” games. The original Tradle asks you to read a country from its exports; Worldle, the best-known cousin, asks you to read one from its silhouette. Both share the same clever feedback idea — after each guess you learn the distance, the direction and a proximity score — so if you can play one, you can play the other. The table below lays out the practical differences for the standard daily experience.

In practice the difference that matters most is what happens after you solve. With duplixo’s Tradle, finishing the daily country is not the end — an unlimited practice mode serves fresh countries on demand, and none of it touches your daily streak. There is no “come back tomorrow” wall, and nothing to unlock with a subscription.