American foreign policy, modelled to scale.

Rule one Choose a chute and press drop. The coin meets eight rows of pegs, goes left or right at each one, evenly, and comes off the walls if it reaches them. Where it goes in is the only say you get; after that nothing steers it, and there is nothing you can do about it.

Rule two There are 256 ways down from every chute, and the number beside each slot is how many of them end there. They are counted, not estimated, which is why they change the moment you move the chute and why they still add up to 256 when they do. From the middle they are Pascal's eighth row — seventy to the centre, one to each far edge. From the far left, seventy end at the far left. The board is not weighted. Aiming it is not the same thing.

Rule three Drop as often as you like. The department files the first ruling of each day and disregards every drop after it, which is also roughly how it works down there. The filing is kept in this browser and goes nowhere else.

Rule four This is a model, not a forecast. It predicts nothing, polls nobody and quotes no one. It is nine things that have visibly happened, arranged by how often they happen — and the arrangement is the only opinion on the board.

Rule five One slot is a number rather than a joke. Canada supplied 63.4% of the crude oil the United States imported in 2025, along with almost all of its imported natural gas and 81.3% of its imported electricity. Nothing else on this board is a statistic, and that one is sourced.

The number is real; the machine is not. Canada Energy Regulator — 2025 Canada–U.S. energy trade