Higher/Lower now has four ways to play

Higher/Lower started with one question: two countries, one stat, which is bigger? That's still the daily puzzle, and it's still the whole game in its purest form.

But the levels have grown up. What launched as 132 levels across two stat sets is now 276 levels across four tabs — and the fourth one plays nothing like the first three.

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Classic Stats (levels 1–60)

The original six: population, area, GDP, UNESCO sites, land borders, year of independence. Sorted easy to hard. This is where most people start, and it's still the best warm-up for the daily puzzle.

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New Stats (levels 61–132)

Eight categories beyond the basics: Olympic gold medals, coastline length, life expectancy, internet speed, military spending, Nobel prizes, FIFA ranking, and tourism numbers. Same binary higher/lower mechanic — the challenge is that these stats are less intuitive. You probably have a rough sense of which country is bigger. You probably don't have a rough sense of which one has faster internet.

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World Records (levels 133–204)

Six more categories, picked because the answers are genuinely surprising: happiness score, McDonald's count, forest cover percentage, average height, coffee consumption per capita, and FIFA ranking. Sourced from the World Happiness Report, Wikipedia, the World Bank, NCD-RisC, and the International Coffee Organization.

This tab is where the "wait, really?" moments live. Every round ends with a fun fact if one's available — a one-line reveal about the winning country tied to that stat.

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Podium (levels 205–276)

This is the one that's actually new mechanically, not just new data.

Instead of two countries, you get three. Instead of tapping higher or lower, you drag them into order — highest to lowest — across all 18 categories from the first three tabs combined.

Podium is deliberately hard the whole way through. The other tabs ease you in, easy levels first, hard ones later. Podium doesn't — every trio in it is pulled from the tightest 35% of the spread for that category, so there are no easy calls and no exact ties to lean on. It's built to be close every time, even at level 205.

There's no live feedback while you're sorting either. The cards stay neutral until you hit submit — no colour change, no hint, nothing to correct you mid-drag. You commit to an order and then find out.

Scoring is all-or-nothing: get the full order right, or it doesn't count. Partial credit isn't part of the design — three-way ties in the real data are close enough that "two out of three" would mostly be luck anyway.

On desktop it's drag and drop. On mobile, tap two cards to swap them.

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How the pairing works

Every tab (except Podium) uses the same underlying logic: pairs are chosen so the gap between countries is neither trivial nor unfair, using a ratio threshold for stats like population and GDP, and a raw difference threshold for stats like founding year. No country repeats within a single level. Podium adds a third constraint on top: no exact ties, and only the closest calls make the cut.

Two stats — FIFA ranking and year of independence — are inverted, since lower is actually "better" for both.

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Play

Higher/Lower is free, no account needed: higher.stoop.games

The daily puzzle covers Classic, New Stats, and World Records. Podium is levels-only for now — a hardcore side mode for anyone who's cleared the rest.