HEADCOUNT
Day 10 · Jun 18, 2026
Lighting up the world…
Circle exactly
600,000,000people
Population data: GHS-POP R2023A (2025 epoch), EC Joint Research Centre
draw any shape · one official shot ·
Headcount is a free daily population game. Every day there is one target — today it's 600,000,000 people — and you draw one loop, any shape, anywhere on Earth. Lock it in and the game counts the real population inside what you drew. The closer you land to the target, the higher your score out of 100.
The official attempt is committed blind: no live count, just your read of the glowing population map. That keeps the daily leaderboard a test of density intuition, not patience. After your official shape is locked, unlimited practice replays turn on a live population ticker — that's how you calibrate your sense of how many people live in a metro area, a river valley, or half a continent.
Full rules, scoring table, and strategy tips: how to play Headcount.
Population data: GHS-POP R2023A (2025 epoch), EC Joint Research Centre. Headcount aggregates the GHS-POP 1 km global population grid (2025 epoch) into the playable map. Population is modeled from census and satellite data, so treat every count as a careful estimate rather than a head-by-head tally — the scoring is built around that, and a ±2% read still scores 98 or better. Your official number is always recomputed server-side on a finer grid than the one your browser uses for previews.
Headcount is a free daily population game. Every day there is one population target. You draw a single loop anywhere on a world map — any shape, any size — and your score depends on how close the real number of people living inside your loop comes to the target.
Headcount uses GHS-POP from the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (2025 epoch), a global ~1 km population grid built from census and satellite data. Population is modeled, so every count is a careful estimate — scoring is designed around that, and a ±2% read still scores 98 or better.
Score = 100 minus your percentage miss: 100 × (1 − |actual − target| / target), floored at zero. Enclose 9.4M people against a 10M target and you score 94.0. Enclosing double the target (or nobody at all) scores 0.
Your first locked-in shape is your official score for the day — committed blind, with no live population count. After that you get unlimited practice replays with a live people counter while you draw, which is the fastest way to build population-density intuition.
Yes. Every daily puzzle is free with no account required. Premium is optional and only removes ads.