Thursday, August 10, 2023

City Guesser

One little known rule of GIS is that if you make an interactive geography game then you have to call it 'City Guessr' or 'City Guesser'. At least I assume that is why there are so many online map games bearing that epithet.

CityGuessr is a fun daily challenge which requires you to identify a location shown on an interactive map. Identifying a location from an unlabeled map can be very hard so each day you are provided with a number of clues to that day's challenge.

Each of the provided clues are worth a number of points. Use a clue and the designated number of points are deducted from your score. If you like CityGuessr (and you haven't played it before) then you don't need to wait until tomorrow for another game. Go to the CityGuessr MyPage and you can play any day's challenge that you haven't yet completed. You can also view how many times you have played and how many daily challenges you have won.

Fans of GeoGuessr should have no problem understanding how to play Cityguessr. In Cityguessr you are shown a Street View panorama of a random city. All you have to do is identify the city using the visual clues (street signs, street furniture, architectural signs etc) within the Street View images. 

In most cities you can explore a little by using the arrow signs in Street View to move yourself around. However you only have 150 seconds before you have to make a guess. Unfortunately sometimes Cityguessr gives you a user submitted Street View and you are unable to explore - which can make identifying the correct city very difficult. It's still fun to try though and if you do guess right it makes it even more satisfying.

City-Guesser is a fun map quiz which tests your knowledge of world cities. In City-Guesser you are shown the maps of major cities around the world. All you have to do is name which city is being shown in each map. To ensure that the game isn't ridiculously easy all the place-name labels have been removed from each city map. 

If you guess a location correctly you proceed to the next round. Guess wrong and the game is over. You get points for each correct answer. The game keeps a record of the maximum level you reach (the number of correct answers in one game) and your highest score. Your aim therefore is to beat your own high score and your highest level reached. Or you can try and beat me. So far I've reached level 7.

City Guesser is a fun location guessing game, which requires you to identify a location revealed in a video and point to it on an interactive map. 

The game shows you a random video of someone walking around a city or a famous monument. You have to pick up on the visual clues in the video (such as the languages & words used in street signs and the design of the street furniture) to identify where you think the video was shot. Once you have made your guess you just need to click on an interactive map and you are awarded points based on how close you got to the real location. 

There are a number of different games that you can play. You can choose to view videos just from one country - or you can play either a Worldwide or Europe game - featuring videos from across the world or from just within Europe. I'm not exactly well traveled so I was surprised at how many European cities I could identify from the videos. I didn't do so well on American cities. This may be partly to do with the fact that there are less cultural differences between different American cities than there are between different European cities. It is also obviously partly to do with my lack of knowledge of American cities. 

There is also monuments quiz, which shows you videos of famous monuments around the world. I'm happy to report that I'm the world champion at identifying well known monuments.

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