What Is Tradle? The OEC's Trade Guessing Game, Explained

Tradle is a free daily geography game created by the OEC (Observatory of Economic Complexity) in which players guess a country from a treemap of its exports, in six tries or fewer.

Think Wordle, but instead of five letters you get a colorful mosaic of copper, cars, coffee, or microchips — and the answer is a country. It launched in March 2022 and quickly became one of the most popular geography games on the web.

What sets it apart from the hundreds of other Wordle spinoffs is the substance underneath: every puzzle is a real chart of real customs data, drawn from the same platform researchers and journalists use to study world trade. You can genuinely get better at economics by playing it.

01Who Made Tradle?

Tradle was built by Alexander Simoes, co-creator of the OEC and CTO of Datawheel, the data-visualization studio that runs the platform. He adapted the open-source Worldle formula — itself inspired by Wordle — swapping country silhouettes for export treemaps.

The timing was no accident. In early 2022 the internet was in full Wordle fever, and dozens of "-dle" spinoffs appeared — but most were word games. Tradle stood out because its puzzle was built on a serious dataset the OEC had been refining for a decade.

The game is open source under the MIT license, which is why several community versions exist, including this one. The official edition lives at games.oec.world.

02The Tradle Timeline

The OEC itself predates the game by over a decade — it began at the MIT Media Lab as a way to make world trade data explorable. Tradle turned that same data into a two-minute morning habit.

By 2023 the game had crossed from puzzle community to mainstream: public radio's Marketplace profiled how Tradle "brings the Wordle formula to global exports", and economics instructors began publishing teaching notes built around it. Within the OEC's own games lineup, Tradle remains the flagship by a wide margin.

03How the Game Works

Each round shows an export treemap: every block is a product, sized by its share of the country's exports. You have six guesses, and each one returns the distance, a direction arrow, and a proximity percentage.

Winning is about recognizing economic fingerprints — copper for Chile, cocoa for Côte d'Ivoire, semiconductors for Chinese Taipei — and triangulating with the clues when the chart alone isn't enough.

Full rules, clue math, and a worked example round are in our how to play Tradle guide.

04Tradle and the OEC: What's the Connection?

Searching for "Tradle OEC"? Here's the relationship in plain terms: the OEC is the data platform, and Tradle is its game. Every treemap in Tradle is an OEC visualization of real customs data.

The numbers come from BACI, a dataset maintained by the French research center CEPII that harmonizes customs records for about 5,000 products traded between 200+ economies. When you play Tradle, you are literally reading the same charts economists use.

Products are grouped using the Harmonized System (HS), the international customs classification — that's why block labels read like "Mineral fuels, oils & waxes" rather than plain "oil". Each color family in the treemap corresponds to one of 21 HS sections, from animal products to precious metals.

That data link is also what makes the game educational rather than trivia: the answer is always encoded in the economics. Learn more about the trade data behind this site.

05Tradle vs Worldle vs Wordle

The family resemblance is real — each game borrows the six-guess, share-your-grid formula — but the puzzle changes completely with each generation.

Tradle is widely considered the hardest of the three, because a treemap doesn't look like anything on a map. That difficulty is exactly what makes an unlimited practice mode worth having.

06Why Teachers Use Tradle in Class

Tradle has a devoted following among economics and geography teachers, and it has been used as a classroom warm-up to build "geographic literacy" in international trade courses.

The appeal is simple: students argue about whether a treemap is Ghana or Côte d'Ivoire, and in doing so they learn export structures no lecture could make stick. An unlimited mode makes it practical for a 40-minute lesson — one shared daily puzzle doesn't survive contact with 30 students.

It also rewards exactly the reasoning economics courses try to teach: forming a hypothesis from data, testing it, and updating on feedback. Six guesses is a Bayesian updating exercise wearing a game's clothes.

07Play Tradle Without Limits

The official game gives you one country per day. If that's not enough — for practice, for teaching, or because you're hooked — Tradle Unlimited offers endless rounds with the same rules and the same real data, plus the official daily puzzle in a separate tab.

08Frequently Asked Questions