Le Bon Rang is a free daily game about the cities of France, and an atlas of the data it is played on. It is made by one person, Eliott Gandiolle, an independent developer based in Paris. There is no company behind it, no investors and no editorial team: when this page says “we” it means one developer and a build script.
Every day at midnight, local time, the same puzzle is published for everyone: 5 rounds. The first 3 ask you to drag 5 French cities into the right order for a single real-world statistic, one per theme (geography first, then real life, then a round just for fun). The fourth shows a photograph of a monument and asks which city it stands in, in 3 guesses. The fifth shows a blank map of France and asks for one last pin.
Locking in a ranking reveals the true figures and links the source. A day holds 900 points of content, and the bonuses (a perfect round, the “6th place” side bet) can carry a score to 1125. No account, no sign-up, no download, and the same puzzle for every player on a given day, so scores are actually comparable.
Eliott Gandiolle, an independent developer in Paris, France. I build a small family of free daily games in my own time: Le Bon Rang, Geopolitix (the country-ranking one), DailyGeo and DailyMetro. I write the code, assemble the datasets, draw the pixel icons and write the pages. The formal publisher details, as French law requires them, are on the legal notice.
I am not a geographer, a statistician or an urban planner, and this site is not a research output. It is a game built carefully on other people's published data, which is why the sourcing below matters more than my opinion does.
Every figure on this site comes from a named public dataset. The 49 criteria the game measures rest on 20 distinct sources: INSEE for legal populations, the census and Filosofi incomes; IGN, via data.gouv.fr, for outlines and altitudes; geo.api.gouv.fr for the commune registry; Météo-France for the climate records; the Ministry of Sport for the sports-licence census; INSEE SIRENE for businesses (bars, wine shops, breweries); the Ministry of Culture's Basilic database for museums, cinemas and bookshops; DHUP-ANIL for the rent map; SNCF for station footfall; SSMSI for recorded crime; DREES for access to doctors; Agreste and the French Biodiversity Office for farming and hunting returns; and the road-safety service, the Cour des comptes, DGFiP and the Ministry of Education for the rest.
The source and the year are printed under every table and on every reveal in the game, and each links back to the original. There is no in-between step where a number gets retyped: the 98 rankings are read out of the dataset when the site is built, so a page cannot quote a figure the game no longer plays, and the atlas and the board can never disagree.
The photo round's photographs come from Wikimedia Commons under free licences (public domain, CC0, CC BY, CC BY-SA); the reveal credits the photographer and links the source. The pool holds 99 photographed cities.
The day is derived from the date alone, with no clock and no randomness at play time, so everyone gets the same 5 rounds. The ranking rounds draw from the 100 best-known communes under two constraints: a familiarity weighting, so the big cities carry most days and the hundredth-biggest is a rare guest, and a spread rule, so the 5 cities are far enough apart on the metric to be ordered by reasoning rather than by luck.
Once a day has been served it is pinned to a file and never redrawn. A later change to the data or the criteria cannot rewrite a puzzle somebody has already played. The correct order, by contrast, is recomputed from live data on every load: the reveal prints each city's value, and an order frozen months ago would contradict the figure beside it.
Le Bon Rang is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to INSEE, IGN, Météo-France, SNCF, any government ministry or the Wikimedia Foundation. Their data is used under its own terms, mostly the Licence Ouverte, and credited on every page that uses it.
The scope is stated and it is limited: the game is played on 1 131 communes (those of at least 10 000 inhabitants, plus a handful of villages kept for their renown), and the city pages cover 5 589 communes of at least 2 000 inhabitants. That is not the whole of France: there are around 35,000 communes, and the northernmost or highest of them is very likely a village we do not carry. So every page states its own scope next to its table, and every heading says “cities”.
A ranking is only ever as good as the source behind it. Commune-level data arrives at different vintages and is not all from the same year. Rates per inhabitant become unstable in small communes, and the per-licence sports criteria in particular are dominated by mountain villages where a figure per 1,000 inhabitants stops meaning anything, which is why those are left out of the catalog. The city pages' score out of 100 is a DECLARED score whose formula, weighting and exclusions are printed on the page; it is not an official league table and nobody but us vouches for it.
If you find an error, tell me and I will fix it or say why I have not. Corrections are the only feedback that changes the site the same week.
Le Bon Rang is free and always has been. Running costs are covered by third-party advertising and by entirely voluntary donations. Nothing is sold to players, there is no paid tier and no feature is withheld from anyone. What data is and is not collected, and what the advertising does with cookies, is set out in full on the privacy page.
Corrections, questions, press, or a note about a city that is ranked wrongly: write to dailymetrolive@gmail.com and it reaches me directly. There is no support team and no ticket system, so replies are personal and occasionally slow.