Compassle
What this is
Every day you place five political ideas on a grid. Left to right is economics, and bottom to top runs from libertarian to authoritarian. After each one you see where it sits and how close you were.
Where the positions come from
Nobody can say exactly where an idea belongs, so Compassle doesn't guess. Each idea sits at the average position of the political parties that give it the most backing or attention, taken from two academic datasets.
- Chapel Hill Expert Survey 2024 (CHES). Political scientists rate parties in 31 European countries on left-right, on a cultural scale, and on individual issues. For an idea such as free trade, Compassle finds the parties that most strongly back it and averages where they sit.
- Manifesto Project Dataset 2026a. Researchers code how much of each election manifesto goes to each topic. For ideas such as military strength or trade unions, Compassle averages the positions of manifestos (since 2010, from 62 countries) that give the topic the most space.
What to keep in mind
- Parties that back an idea are not the idea itself. A position here is a guide, not a verdict.
- CHES covers Europe only, so many cards reflect European politics.
- CHES's vertical scale (green/libertarian to traditional/authoritarian) is a close cousin of libertarian-authoritarian, not the same thing. The Manifesto Project's vertical axis is built by Compassle from cultural categories and is rougher.
- Averages pull toward the middle, so many ideas sit closer to the centre than you might expect.
Think a card is in the wrong place? Tell us.
Citations
Rovny, Jan, Jonathan Polk, Ryan Bakker, Liesbet Hooghe, Seth Jolly, Gary Marks, Marco Steenbergen, and Milada Anna Vachudova. 2025. "The 2024 Chapel Hill Expert Survey on political party positioning in Europe: Twenty-five years of party positional data." Electoral Studies 97 (October). doi:10.1016/j.electstud.2025.102981
Lehmann, Pola / Franzmann, Simon / Al-Gaddooa, Denise / Ivanusch, Christoph / Riethmüller, Felicia / Samstag, Svenja / Volkens, Andrea / Weßels, Bernhard / Zehnter, Lisa (2026): The Manifesto Data Collection. Manifesto Project (MRG/CMP/MARPOR). Version 2026a. Berlin: Wissenschaftszentrum Berlin für Sozialforschung (WZB) / Göttingen: Institut für Demokratieforschung (IfDem). doi.org/10.25522/manifesto.mpds.2026a
Icons: Lucide (ISC licence).
Privacy
Compassle has no accounts, no cookies and no advertising. Your scores, streaks and progress are stored in your own browser. Clearing site data removes them, so use Export in "Your record" if you want a copy.
When you finish a daily puzzle, the site sends one anonymous record to be counted: the puzzle number, your total and your score on each idea. It carries no name, ID, cookie or IP address, and nothing links it to you or to your other games. It's used only to see how many people play and which ideas are hard.
The site also uses Cloudflare Web Analytics to count visits. It records things like page views, rough country, device type and where a visit came from. It sets no cookies and builds no profile of individual visitors.