How to play a daily geography guessing game
GuessGlobe gives everyone in the world the same AI-generated scene each UTC day; you name a country, and each of your 5 guesses is answered with a great-circle distance, one of eight direction arrows and a proximity colour, plus one more clue.
The whole game is one screen and takes about two minutes. There is no account, nothing to install, and no way to play ahead — tomorrow's puzzle does not exist on this server yet.
The four steps
- Look at the scene. It is an ordinary outdoor view: vegetation, terrain, the materials the roofs are made of, which side of the road traffic drives on, the writing system on signage, how high the sun sits. It is never a landmark, and there is never readable text in the picture.
- Type a country. Autocomplete offers matches as you type; a name the game does not recognise is refused without costing you a guess.
- Read the answer to your guess. Distance in kilometres, an arrow pointing from your guess towards the answer, and a colour for how close you got. A new clue is revealed as well.
- Repeat until you get it or run out. 5 guesses, then the answer is shown and you get a scorecard you can copy.
Play today's puzzleOne scene, five guesses, the same puzzle everyone else gets today.
How a guess is scored
Published in full, because a rule you can check beats a rule that is merely accurate. Every line below is the rule the code actually applies.
| Rule | What the game does |
|---|---|
| Distance | Great-circle (haversine) distance between the capital city of the country you guessed and the coordinate of the place the scene depicts. |
| Source: GuessGlobe scoring code, src/game/scoring.ts · checked | |
| The guess end of the measurement | Always the capital city of the country you guessed. Never a centroid, and never a mixture of the two. Two countries use a seat of government instead, and both are documented in the country table. |
| Source: GuessGlobe country table, src/game/countries.ts · checked | |
| The answer end of the measurement | The puzzle's own coordinate — the city the scene was built from — not the answer country's capital. A scene at the eastern edge of a continent-spanning country is therefore measured from that eastern edge, not from a capital thousands of kilometres away. |
| Source: GuessGlobe scoring code, src/game/scoring.ts · checked | |
| Direction | The initial great-circle bearing from your guess to the answer, rounded to one of eight arrows. |
| Source: GuessGlobe scoring code, src/game/scoring.ts · checked | |
| Proximity colours | 🟩 under 500 km · 🟨 500–2,000 km · 🟧 2,000–5,000 km · 🟥 over 5,000 km · 🎯 the right country. A distance on a boundary belongs to the closer band. |
| Source: GuessGlobe scoring code, src/game/scoring.ts · checked | |
| Known imprecision | One point per country means that guessing a very large country gives a distance measured from its capital, which can be thousands of kilometres from the part of it you meant. This is a real limitation of the rule, not a bug, and it is published rather than smoothed over. |
| Source: GuessGlobe scoring rules · checked | |
The scorecard
When the game ends you get a block of text like this, which you can copy with one button:
🌐 GuessGlobe #128 3/5 🟥⬅️ 🟧↖️ 🟩⬆️ 🎯 organic-ng27.pages.dev/?s=1
It carries the puzzle number, your score, and one row per guess. It deliberately gives nothing away — no country, no city, no distances, no picture — so you can paste it anywhere without spoiling the day for whoever reads it. That restraint is the entire reason this kind of scorecard travels.
Questions people ask about the rules
- How do you play GuessGlobe?
- Look at the day's scene, type a country, and press Guess. You are told how far your guess was from the place in the picture, which direction to go, and a colour for how close you are. You get 5 guesses, a new clue after each one, and one puzzle per day.
- How is the distance calculated?
- Great-circle (haversine) distance between two points: the capital city of the country you guessed, and the coordinate of the place the scene depicts. Because the answer end is the depicted place rather than that country's capital, a scene in the far east of a huge country is measured from the far east of it.
- What do the coloured squares mean?
- Green is under 500 km, yellow 500–2,000 km, orange 2,000–5,000 km, red over 5,000 km, and the target emoji means you named the right country. A distance exactly on a boundary belongs to the closer band.
- Why does my guess look wrong on a map?
- Because the country you guessed is represented by a single point — its capital. Guess a country that spans a continent and the distance is measured from its capital, which may be thousands of kilometres from the edge you had in mind. We publish the rule rather than hiding the effect, so you can reason about it.