How Mystery Map chooses years
A Mystery Map uses one recent reference year with enough country coverage to make the pattern playable. That keeps the map honest: a player is reading one global snapshot, not a stitched-together timeline.
Why some countries are missing
Missing values usually mean the provider did not publish a usable value for that country in the selected year. Those countries are hatched on the map and do not count as low values.
Why rates beat raw totals
Raw totals often reward knowing which countries are biggest. Mystery Map prioritizes rates, shares, percentages, and per-person measures because they create fairer visual puzzles about structure, not just scale.
How distractors are reviewed
Good wrong answers should feel plausible without being unfair. Daily-ready maps are reviewed so the answer choices point at nearby ideas, not nearly identical maps.
How editorial eligibility works
Not every real dataset makes a good puzzle. Some maps are better for Practice, some are saved for expert play, and some are held back because the pattern is too muddy or too close to another answer.
How Pattern Atlas sources rules
Pattern Atlas is not a choropleth game. Its catalog entries cite sources for the highlighted country-set rule, include plausible decoys, and use mapped-country wording when the current map omits small states.
How Order Atlas uses indicator artifacts
Order Atlas rounds name the indicator up front and ask you to rank countries. The true order, values, unit, year, and source link are rendered from the existing approved Mystery Map artifacts, so ordering rounds do not maintain a separate hand-copied dataset.
Why some indicators are retired
Retired indicators are not fake or unsupported; they simply make weaker puzzles. Some are near-duplicates of better maps, some are too ambiguous, and some depend on definitions that are not satisfying to infer from an unlabeled map.
Corrections and map issues
If a map looks wrong, report the game date, country, and what looked suspicious. Source links or screenshots help turn a hunch into a clean correction.
Report a data/source issueKnown limitations
The current indicator catalog is static, country-level, and World Bank focused. It does not include subnational variation, disputed border quizzes, cloud-synced Order Atlas results, public leaderboards, or non-World Bank indicator providers yet.
