Off the Map — Official Rules

Entry

• Pro-only game — leaderboard glory, no prize. Anyone can read this page, the weekly board, and the results; playing requires MockSlate Pro. There is no cash award of any kind.
• Entrants must be 18 or older with a MockSlate account. One entry per person.
• Join any week — your entry is created with your first pick. Weeks before you joined simply score 0, like any missed week. There is no elimination: this is a drip game, not survivor.

The weekly cycle & the lock

• Each week during the 2026 season, pick one game from that week’s Sunday 1:00 ET window (the only window in play — a clean pool).
• Picks lock at 11:59 PM ET on the Tuesday before the slate. Picks lock before the week's coverage maps are published.
• Change your pick freely until the lock; after it, the week rides. The lock is enforced by the server clock, not the page.

Scoring

• +3 — your pick is the game covering the smallest share of US land area (not population) on that week’s published coverage map.
• +1 — your pick is the second smallest only; third and below score nothing. Scoring is either/or, never additive: the smallest game scores +3, not +4.
• Season leaderboard is the running total across all weeks; missed weeks score 0.

The judging rule (published for transparency)

Weekly results are judged from the coverage map as published by 506sports — credited here as the source. Determination is by inspection, with a published tiebreak: if visually close, the game shown in fewer states wins “smallest.” A computed land-area version is a planned upgrade. Their maps are their copyrighted graphics — we link to them and never reproduce them; every illustration on MockSlate is our own original, stylized graphic.

Strategy note

The smallest map is usually two distant, small-market fanbases with nothing national at stake — but protections, doubleheader structure, and which network holds the doubleheader that week all move the blob. The coverage-map literacy this game teaches is exactly what the weekly maps reward.