01 · The Round Loop

A panorama, a world map, and nothing in between but deduction.

• Five rounds, one map Five rounds drawn from the map you queued into, each worth up to 5,000 points. A perfect game is 25,000.
• Nothing tells you where you are No counter, no region name, no hint. Your only inputs are the pixels in front of you and the compass on the minimap.
• Pan before you move A full turn from the drop point costs two seconds and usually settles the continent. Walk off early and you miss the sign behind you.
• The pin is a claim, the button is the commit Clicking the minimap drops a marker you can drag freely. Only the Guess button locks it, and then the round is over.
• Distance is the only currency Your score comes from the great circle distance between your pin and the true panorama. The right country is worth little placed 900 km off.
• The result screen is the lesson Each round ends with a line from your pin to the target. Look at what surrounded the target before clicking through.
• The clock is a setting, not a rule Classic games let you pick the round timer, from no limit down to seconds. A timeout places no pin at all.

02 · Scoring & Distance

One exponential curve decides everything. Learn where it falls away.

Distance from the target	Round score on the world map	What that usually means
Under 150 m	5,000	A perfect round. On the world map anything inside roughly 150 m rounds up, so you never need the exact house.
1 km	about 4,997	Right street, wrong block. The curve is nearly flat here, so hunting the exact corner rarely repays the clock.
10 km	about 4,967	Right town. A realistic ceiling for a rural drop with one readable sign.
50 km	about 4,835	Right region. A strong result from vegetation, poles and road paint alone, with no text.
100 km	about 4,676	Right province. The usual outcome when you know the country instantly and place on instinct.
500 km	about 3,576	Right country, wrong end of it. Common in Brazil, Russia, Australia, Canada and the United States.
1,000 km	about 2,558	Right corner of the world. You had the region and missed the country, or missed by half a large one.
2,000 km	about 1,308	Right continent, nothing more. Still worth placing, because an unplaced round scores zero.
5,000 km	about 175	Wrong continent. The curve has collapsed, so 5,000 km and 9,000 km score nearly the same.

03 · Game Modes

Seven ways to play the same panorama, each rewarding a different habit.

• Classic Five rounds on any map with the timer and movement rules you choose. This is where you learn, because a drop can take as long as you want.
• Duels One opponent, both sides on 6,000 health. The lower score each round loses health equal to the gap, and the match ends at zero.
• Team Duels The same health rules with a shared pin. Your side gets one guess per round, so disagreements are settled before the lock, not after.
• Battle Royale A large lobby that shrinks each round. The Countries variant takes a life for a wrong country; the Distance variant cuts the worst guesses.
• Country Streak One continuous run with no round limit. Name the country and it advances, miss once and it resets to zero.
• Daily Challenge One five round game per day on the same locations for everybody, single attempt. Useful for measuring yourself against the field.
• Explorer Country by country play that awards a medal per country. It builds the regional vocabulary every other mode quietly assumes you have.

04 · Movement Rulesets

Three rulesets that behave like three different games.

• Moving Arrows, panning and zoom all enabled. You can follow the road until you find text, which makes signage the clue and the clock the constraint.
• No Move Locked to the drop panorama, still able to turn and zoom. Text is whatever is in view, so poles and bollards carry the answer.
• NMPZ No move, no pan, no zoom: one fixed frame per round. Strong players here read soil, foliage and road paint before looking for words.
• The queues are rated separately Competitive play is split by ruleset, so your standing under full movement and under NMPZ are different numbers that do not transfer.
• Move with a reason or not at all Every step burns clock. Walk toward something you already spotted, a junction or a lettered building, rather than down the road in hope.
• Zoom is a microscope, not comfort Zoom to read a plate shape, a pole top or four letters on an awning. Zooming at random on an empty verge burns the round.

05 · Camera & Vehicle Clues

The car that took the photo is a clue, and so is the camera bolted to it.

• Camera generation Coverage was shot with successive camera rigs, each with its own resolution, colour and sky seam. Generation narrows the country list before you read a word.
• Older generations are a shortlist Several countries were driven once, years ago, and never revisited. A washed out panorama is a list of a handful, not of two hundred.
• The vehicle under the blur Roof racks, aerials, snorkels and bumper outlines survive the blur. Some runs used one recognisable vehicle for a whole country; Kenya is the classic.
• Blur shape and rig type The mask over the car differs between runs, and backpack coverage removes the vehicle entirely while raising the horizon.
• Dirt, water spots and lens marks A smear or dust pattern repeats across every panorama from one drive. Spotting it identifies the run, which is narrower than the country.
• Unofficial panoramas User contributed 360 photos appear where no car could drive. They cluster in particular countries, and many community maps exclude them.
• The coverage date The copyright line in the corner dates the drive. With the season on the ground it rules out countries covered only in another year.

06 · Language & Script

Script narrows the world to a region. The rest of the frame picks the country.

• Read the script first Cyrillic, Greek, Georgian, Armenian, Arabic, Thai, Khmer, Devanagari, Hangul and the Japanese kana each cut the map down before any translation.
• Latin diacritics are near decisive The Romanian comma below, the Polish stroked l, the Czech hacek and the Turkish dotless i each belong to a very short list of countries.
• Domain suffixes on signage Van livery, awnings and billboards carry web addresses. A two letter country suffix on a van is among the most reliable single clues.
• Phone number shape Digit count, grouping and the leading pattern differ by country, and separate neighbours that happen to share a language.
• Road sign typefaces Highway authorities pick a typeface and keep it for decades. British, German and French direction signs separate at a glance.
• Chains and brands travel in patterns Fuel brands, banks, convenience chains and telecom logos map onto countries, and sometimes onto single regions inside one.
• A language is not a country Spanish, Portuguese, French, Arabic and Russian each span many states. Words give you the family; poles, plates and paint give you the member.

07 · Roads & Infrastructure

Roadside furniture is the most reliable text free evidence on the page.

• Which side they drive on Around seventy five countries drive on the left. Confirm from parked cars, oncoming traffic or the steering wheel of a passing vehicle.
• Centre line colour Yellow centre lines point at the Americas plus Japan and Korea; white covers most of Europe, Africa and Oceania. The fastest filter there is.
• Bollards The highest value object at the roadside. Height, cross section, colour band and reflector shape are national, and many countries run one design.
• Utility poles Wooden poles with crossarms, slim concrete, steel lattice and the Stobie poles of South Australia all say something. Note the insulator count.
• Guardrails and chevrons Rail profile, post spacing and the arrangement of chevron boards on a bend are standardised nationally and change at the border.
• Licence plates Plate proportions, background colour, the blue European Union strip and whether front and rear match will cut a shortlist to one.
• Road surface and shoulder Tarmac colour, kerb profile, edge line width and the gap between road and vegetation form a signature that holds across a country.

08 · Landscape, Sun & Season

When the built environment gives you nothing, the ground and the sky still do.

• Sun position gives the hemisphere Near midday the sun sits south in the northern hemisphere and north in the southern. Read shadows against the compass and you halve the planet.
• Orient with the minimap compass The compass tells you which way the camera faces. Without it a shadow is just a shadow, so orient first and interpret second.
• Vegetation Eucalyptus for Australia, birch and pine for the Nordics and Russia, olive and cypress around the Mediterranean, palms in the tropics.
• Soil colour Deep red lateritic soil runs through much of Brazil, sub Saharan Africa and northern Australia. Pale sand and volcanic black carry their own lists.
• Terrain and horizon The horizon separates the Andes from the Great Plains, taiga from steppe, and flat Baltic farmland from rolling Atlantic pasture.
• Season and light Snow, bare branches, harvested stubble and the height of the sun date the drive, and often eliminate a hemisphere on their own.

09 · Competitive Duels & Ranks

Ranked play is not about the best guess. It is about the guess that survives the exchange.

• Health, not points A duel turns on the gap between the two scores, not either alone. 4,200 against 4,300 costs nothing; 4,200 against 900 is most of a match.
• The multiplier punishes long matches Damage is multiplied by a figure that climbs as the match runs on, so a round survivable early can end the game later.
• Locking early applies pressure Once you commit, the other side is on a shortened countdown. A slow pin in a winning position throws that advantage away.
• Divisions and rating Ranked seasons place you in a division and move you on results, and because rulesets are rated separately you hold one standing in each.
• Play the scoreline, not the map Ahead on health, take the safe centre of the country. Behind on health, commit to a region, because a tidy draw does not save you.
• Equal scores do nothing Identical scores deal no damage. A round where both sides nail the country only advances the multiplier, which favours whoever leads.

10 · Practice & Improvement

The skill is a lookup table you build by hand. There is no way around that.

• Country before distance Until you name the right country most of the time, precision work is wasted. Country Streak is the honest scoreboard for that stage.
• Work through Explorer country by country One country at a time builds the associations the world map assumes you carry. Slower than random drops, and the reason strong players are strong.
• Review the line after every round Open the result, see where the target was, and name the clue you missed. Two minutes of that beats another ten rounds.
• Keep a written clue list Write down the bollard, the pole, the plate, the paint. Writing it by hand moves a clue from recognised to recalled.
• One region at a time Spend a week on South America, then a week on the Balkans. Shallow familiarity with everywhere behaves exactly like a coin flip.
• Play NMPZ deliberately Removing movement and zoom forces you to read the frame instead of hunting a sign. It makes full movement rounds feel slow and obvious.

11 · Pro Tips

Habits that compound.

• Settle the hemisphere first Vegetation, sun position and centre line colour resolve the hemisphere in seconds, removing most of the map before you read any text.
• Place inside the country, not on its edge A pin on a border can land in the wrong country and lose the round outright. Knowing only the country, aim for its middle.
• One strong clue beats three weak ones A single bollard you know cold beats three impressions you half remember. Trust the object you can name.
• Zoom the minimap before you lock A pin that looks right at world zoom can be two hundred kilometres out. One second of zoom is often worth a thousand points.
• Always place something A round with no pin scores zero. A continent level guess on a dying clock beats an empty map, so pin early and refine.
• Learn the map you queued into Community maps have coverage biases, and the widely played ones lean toward particular countries. The pool sets your prior before the panorama loads.
• Review beats volume Players who run three hundred rounds and never look back plateau. Players who run a hundred and study every miss keep climbing.