About
What this is
ROTA is a daily sea voyage puzzle. The idea is simple: about 80% of world trade moves by sea, and that traffic has a geometry of its own. The track a container ship draws from northern Europe to East Asia looks nothing like the track an ore carrier draws from Western Australia to northern China. Learning to recognise those shapes is a bit like learning to read a chart.
Why no map?
Leaving the map out is deliberate. The moment you add a coastline the puzzle turns into a geography quiz; take it away and what remains is the shape of the route. There is a side benefit: no projection to choose and no antimeridian to fight. A route across the Pacific stays one continuous curve instead of being cut in half.
Typography
Nautical charts have a lettering convention: anything to do with water is set in italic, anything to do with land is set upright. The same rule applies here — distance run and port of arrival in italic serif, port names in upright condensed sans, numeric data in mono. The palette comes from night bridge lighting: dark ground, low glare, a single green accent.
Data sources
Port coordinates come from a hand-curated list of 256 ports, built in the spirit of the World Port Index: the approximate centre of the port facility rather than the city. Route geometry is computed with the open-source searoute library. Strait transits are detected programmatically from the route geometry itself, not written by hand.
What is not used
No live vessel tracking (AIS). No data is scraped from services such as MarineTraffic or VesselFinder — their terms do not allow it. The voyages represent real commercial trade lanes; they are not a particular ship on a particular day.
Technical
No server, no account, no database. The pages are plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript generated by a Python build script. All game state lives in your browser's localStorage; nothing is sent anywhere.
Contact
Found a bug, a gap, or a route that looks wrong? Write to: yagizcetiin@gmail.com