We just launched our 7th game — and there's an 8th in the works

Higher/Lower is live. Two countries, one stat, one click. Here's how it came together — and a look at what's next.

The premise for Higher/Lower came from a simple question: what if you tested geography knowledge through statistics instead of shapes or flags?

Most geography games ask you to recognise something visual. DailyGuessr drops you in a street view panorama. FlagGuessr zooms into a flag. Both are about recognition. Higher/Lower is different — it's about having a mental model of the world. Is Brazil's GDP higher than Australia's? Is Canada bigger than China? You either know it, or you don't.

The data

The game runs on a static JSON file with 171 countries, each with six statistics: population, land area, GDP, UNESCO World Heritage Sites, land borders, and UN membership year.

Six categories sounds simple. In practice it means the daily puzzle can feel completely different day to day. A round comparing UNESCO sites plays nothing like a round comparing land area — the outliers are different, the surprises are different, the feeling of being confidently wrong is different.

The pairs

The hardest part of building this wasn't the game mechanics — it was the 300 country pairs.

A pair where Brazil and Vatican City are compared by population is useless. The answer is obvious before you've finished reading. So is a pair where two similarly-sized countries are compared by a stat that differs by 0.3%. Both are boring for opposite reasons.

Every pair in the game passes through a ratio filter: the larger value has to be between 1.05× and 3.0× the smaller one. Tight enough to be non-trivial, wide enough to actually be answerable without a PhD in geography.

The 60 levels follow a difficulty curve: levels 1–30 use the world's most populous countries and the widest ratios. By level 51, you're comparing land borders between countries most people couldn't point to on a map.

What's live

Higher/Lower is at higher.stoop.games. Five pairs per day, same puzzle for everyone, streak tracking. If you want more, there are 60 levels waiting.

The game joined the Stoop network — which now has seven daily games. You can find all of them at stoop.games.

What's next: FactSlap

The eight game is the most ambitious one we've planned so far.

It's called FactSlap. The mechanic: five claims appear on screen, each posted by a fictional social media account. You decide — True, False, or Missing Context.

That third option is the whole point. Most misinformation doesn't survive fact-checking because it's false — it survives because it's technically true but stripped of context. "Missing Context" is the answer that forces you to think harder than True/False ever would.

Twenty percent of the claims are genuinely, verifiably true. Real facts that sound like misinformation. That's the twist that makes it shareable.

FactSlap needs a content pipeline — real documented claims, sourced and written as fictional tweets from eight parody accounts. It's more work than any game we've built so far. But it's also the one with the most potential to actually matter.