Our first four games were fixed scripts. Every player saw the same ocean, sorted the same items into the same bins, and got the same numbers at the end, wherever they lived. None of it had anything to do with the place the player actually lives. In September 2026 we retired all four and replaced them.
The four new games begin by asking for a ZIP code, and then build themselves around that place. Storm Drain Detective asks you to predict where the water from your street ends up, and then draws the real downstream route to the sea using the U.S. Geological Survey's river network data. Backyard Bioblitz shows species that people have actually recorded near you on iNaturalist, with each photographer credited. Air Detective gives you real hourly air-quality data from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service with the cause hidden, and asks you to work out what happened. Your Climate Record has you commit to a guess about your town and then shows you 75 years of temperature data for it from Open-Meteo.
We set one rule for all four: every figure on the screen comes from a public scientific dataset for that place, with the source named, or it is not shown at all. Two design choices follow from that. In Air Detective, answering that the evidence is not strong enough to say is sometimes the correct answer, and it earns full marks when it is. In Your Climate Record, you are scored on how well calibrated your guess was, and not only on whether it was right.
Each game ends away from the screen, with a real task to do outdoors, a printable sheet for classrooms, and a link into a project that scientists actually use. All four are free and run in a browser with no account. You can find them on the Games page.