About STRATA — The Daily Ranking Puzzle

STRATA is a small daily puzzle game built for the moment between your first sip of coffee and the start of your day. One puzzle. Five items. One hidden axis. Solve it in two minutes and feel sharp.

Why STRATA exists

The current generation of daily web puzzles — Wordle, Connections, Strands, Mini Crossword — proved that millions of people will show up at the same URL every morning if the puzzle is short, fair, and shareable. STRATA was built to sit on that same shelf, but with a different cognitive workout: ranking, not guessing.

Where Wordle exercises vocabulary and Connections exercises lateral association, STRATA exercises calibration — your gut sense of how big, how old, how fast, how far. The items themselves are familiar. The ordering is what tests you.

How it works under the hood

Every day at midnight UTC, a new puzzle goes live. Puzzles are generated with the help of a language model, then validated through a strict fact-checking pipeline against a curated bank of dimensions and items. The categories rotate across geography, biology, history, science, food, language, culture, sports, tech, music, literature, art, and everyday life — thirteen lanes, deterministically sampled per day.

We deliberately steer away from categories where facts shift or vary by source: no "best movie of 2019", no recent stock prices, no Olympic medal tallies. The puzzle should be solvable by anyone with a decent high-school education and a working sense of scale.

What's free, and why

The daily puzzle is free, no account required, no ads, no paywall, no data sold. Signing in unlocks the archive (past puzzles in practice mode), stat tracking, leaderboards, and color themes — that's the trade for an email address. The project runs on Cloudflare Workers at near-zero cost, which is why none of this needs to be monetized.

Where STRATA fits in your morning

• Open it once at breakfast.
• Solve it in 60–120 seconds.
• Share your result if you feel like it.
• Vote on the category you want to see more of.
• Come back tomorrow.

That's the whole loop. There's nothing else to do, on purpose.