About Plain

Most trivia asks whether you know a fact. Plain asks something more interesting: how big is it? How tall is Denali compared with Mont Blanc? Did that film gross more than a billion dollars? Is a Big Mac cheaper in Japan or in Mexico? A sense of scale is useful every day, and it's fun to sharpen.

You never need the exact number. You need a good feel for it, and the game rewards being close rather than being lucky. After every round you see the real values and the best answers, so you leave each game knowing a few things you didn't know that morning.

It's deliberately small: one puzzle a day, the same for everyone, no endless feed. Play it with your coffee, compare with friends, come back tomorrow.

Plain has 64 categories, from box-office grosses and mountain heights to salaries, Big Mac prices and Pokémon weights. Every answer in every list carries a value, the source it came from and the date it was checked. We collect values with scripts from one consistent source per category, so answers in the same round are measured the same way, and we never fill values in from memory.

The main sources:

• Wikipedia and Wikidata: box-office grosses (which cite Box Office Mojo and The Numbers), film runtimes, mountain, building and bridge figures, river lengths, stadium capacities, song lengths, TV episode counts, video game sales, element densities, country areas, Olympic medals, lifespans of famous people, city populations, capital-city coordinates and Instagram follower counts.
• The United Nations World Population Prospects for country populations, the World Bank World Development Indicators for GDP and life expectancy, and UNESCO for World Heritage Sites.
• The US Bureau of Labor Statistics (Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics) for salaries.
• The Economist's Big Mac index for burger prices.
• USDA FoodData Central for food energy, the restaurant chains' own published nutrition information for menu items, and brand data and the CSPI caffeine chart for caffeine.
• AnAge, the animal ageing and longevity database, for animal lifespans and weights, and zoos, wildlife agencies and Wikipedia for animal speeds.
• The CTBUH Skyscraper Center for building heights, Fortune's Global 500 for company revenue, and StockAnalysis market data for company values.
• PokéAPI for Pokémon weights and heights.

The full list, with licences and the credits they require, is on the Sources page.

Some categories are derived from two verified values, such as population density (population ÷ area) or flight time (great-circle distance at airliner cruising speed). The method is stated with each one.

Before an answer list goes live, an automated check makes sure every entry has a source and a positive value in the right unit, that names and alternative spellings don't collide, and that each category has enough answers to make fair puzzles. Values that disagree between sources are looked at by hand, and the reason for the choice is written down.

Puzzles are generated from these lists, and each day's puzzle is frozen once it goes live, so a later data update never changes a game people have already played. If you spot a wrong value, please tell us: corrections are the fastest way to make Plain better.

Plain is made and run independently by one person. It's free to play and supported by ads. Questions, ideas and corrections are welcome at hello@playplain.app. The operator's details are in the legal notice.