Daily games

• City of the Day

  6 guesses

  Find the mystery Canadian city in 6 guesses

  A mystery Canadian city is hidden somewhere in the country. Guess any city of 60,000+ people and you get the distance and direction back — plus whether its population is bigger or smaller. Close in on it, one guess at a time. Same city for everyone, all day.

• 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.

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 Ottawa 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.
• City coordinates come from OpenStreetMap (OpenStreetMap contributors, Open Database Licence) and distances are great-circle distances computed 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.