Tradle

Read the biggest rectangles first. A treemap dominated by a single commodity narrows things quickly — copper suggests Chile, Peru, or Zambia; cocoa points toward West Africa — while a diverse mix of machinery, electronics, and vehicles signals a large industrial economy. Make a first guess consistent with the export profile, then triangulate: the distance and direction feedback turns economic reasoning into geographic elimination. Six guesses is usually enough to bracket a region with your first two answers and walk the arrows the rest of the way. When the map stumps you entirely, guessing a country at the center of the plausible continent maximizes what the arrow tells you.

Tradle's puzzles are generated from the OEC's harmonized international trade datasets, the same data the platform serves to researchers and analysts. That grounding has made it a minor classroom phenomenon: economics instructors have used Tradle as a warm-up activity for connecting trade models to real-world data. The OEC has since built a small stable of daily games on its data, with Tradle as the entry point alongside companions such as Pick 5 on the same hub. Playing daily quietly builds a working sense of who exports what — which is precisely the point.