Guess where the photo was taken

Each round shows one photo of a named place: a cathedral, a fjord, a volcano, a railway station. You tap the map where you think it is. The true spot appears, a line joins it to your pin, and you get the distance and the points.

Points fall off with distance. A pin inside the place's own accuracy radius scores the full 5,000. Five photos make a round, so 25,000 is the ceiling, and nobody reaches it without knowing what a Norwegian fjord looks like next to a Chilean one.

The pool is 1,230 photos of places in 167 countries, each with its coordinates checked and a one-line fact. In the app the same game runs as a daily: five photos, the same five for everyone that day, and a leaderboard. On this page you get a fresh five from the sample below every time you press start.

Distance is measured in a straight line from your pin to the true spot. Each place has an accuracy radius, 10 km for a single building and up to 200 km for a whole region, and that radius is free: anything inside it counts as zero distance. Beyond it the score decays.

The formula is 5,000 × e^(−km ÷ scale), with the scale set by how hard the photo is rated: 1,500 km for easy, 1,000 for medium, 650 for hard, 400 for expert. So a 1,000 km miss on an easy photo still pays 2,567 points; the same miss on an expert photo pays 410.

GeoGuessr drops you into Google Street View and lets you walk around before you guess; free play is capped and unlimited play needs an account and a paid plan. This game uses still photographs instead, one per named place, with the coordinates verified and a fact attached, so a round teaches you something you can check afterwards. There is no account and no paywall.

The trade-off is real. You cannot walk down the road to read a signpost or a number plate. You have to recognise the place, or read the landscape: the colour of the rock, the shape of the roofs, the trees, the light.