What is Redacted Maps?
Redacted Maps presents a choropleth map with its title removed. The color gradient, Low-High legend, hatched No Data regions, and a [CLASSIFIED] unit label remain visible. Your task is to identify what the map measures by reading the gradient pattern and regional color distribution.
How to play
Study the gradient, regional color blocks, and hatched areas that mark missing data. You have three “peek” tokens. Tap an area to reveal its hidden value; the counter at the top shows how many remain.
Enter your answer in the “What does this map show?” field and submit it with the ▶ arrow. After each incorrect guess, the game reveals another clue: the unit after the first error, the category after the second, and a written hint after the third. After three mistakes, you get four answer choices, including the correct one.
Feedback is revealed in stages rather than through proximity clues. The unit remains [CLASSIFIED] until your first mistake. Further errors reveal the data category and then a hint before switching the puzzle to multiple choice. Peeks work separately: they do not evaluate your guess and only show the data for the area you select.
The color scale often tells you more than any single territory. A gradient concentrated in one region suggests a different pattern from one spread across the full range. The darkest and lightest areas usually provide the clearest clues, so save your peeks for the extremes instead of mid-range values. Hatched No Data areas also matter. The territories left out of a dataset can point to its source, collection method, year, or thematic focus.
Look for regional blocks before making a guess. Neighboring areas with similar shading may share a characteristic, while an isolated outlier may be the exception.
One map is released each day at midnight. Each puzzle has a number and a country flag, such as US, in the header.