Puzzle #11 — 2026-07-30
The answer was Botswana. The scene was built from Serowe. Difficulty: hard. This day ran before launch and had no players.
The clues, in the order they were revealed
- Thorn scrub and flat-topped trees over red sand, with bare ground between them.
- Houses stand inside swept sand yards fenced with poles, under corrugated roofs.
- A water tank on legs stands above the rooftops, and cattle wander the verge.
- Signs are in English beside a Bantu language, and traffic keeps to the left.
- The country is landlocked, mostly desert, and one of the least densely populated on earth.
What the scene was built from
The location is chosen first, from a hand-curated whitelist, and the image is generated to match the description below. That order is what makes the answer checkable: the scene is built for the place, not guessed from the picture.
| vegetation | thorn scrub and scattered flat-topped trees over red sand, bare ground between them |
|---|---|
| terrain | a very flat dry plateau with a low rocky rise behind the town |
| architecture | single-storey houses with corrugated roofs inside swept sand yards fenced with poles, a water tank on legs above the roofs |
| roadside | left-hand traffic, one wide tarred road with red sand shoulders, cattle loose along the verge |
| signage | Latin script, English beside a Bantu language (never rendered legibly) |
| light | hard dry-season light, dust and very sharp shadows |
Where this actually is
Serowe, Botswana sits at -22.39, 26.71 — see Serowe, Botswana on OpenStreetMap. The clue ladder and the table above were both written from that place before any picture existed.
This day was one of the roughly third pulled for a second look at image quality and difficulty. How the pictures are made, and why none of them is a photograph.