Monday, March 04, 2024

Can you Draw Europe?

satellite map of Europe

Huge Quiz's Europe Country Drawing Challenge has quickly become my new favorite online game. This is despite the fact that I am absolutely terrible at it and have yet to achieve anything other than a totally embarrassing score.

The premise of the Europe Country Drawing Challenge is very easy. All you have to do is draw European countries on top of a satellite map of Europe. For each country you draw you are awarded points based on how much of your drawn area contains the actual country named and how much of the actual country is contained in your drawn area.

Despite its simple premise the game is very challenging. I look at maps of Europe most days of the week, however it turns out that I have a very bad knowledge of basic European geography. I won't even admit to how many European countries I have managed to get 0 points for while playing the Europe Country Drawing Challenge (meaning that I failed to actually draw around any part of the named country).

One excuse I have is that I have been playing the game using a track-pad. I find it very difficult to draw on the map without suddenly veering wildly off course at some point - especially if I'm having to draw a relatively large country. A lot of people in the game comments also say they couldn't play the game on Android, so this game probably works best on a desktop computer - and with a mouse.

BTW - if you live in the USA then you might want to play Time's See How Well You Can Draw All 50 States game instead.

map of the Nottingham tram system

You may remember that at the end of last year the London Tube Memory Game briefly became very popular. The object of the game is to name as many London Underground stations as you can on an unlabeled map of London. 

Such was the game's popularity that many other versions of the game have since been released, requiring you to name the stations on the transit networks of other global cities. Metro Memory currently has games for 19 cities around the world. 

There is now also the Nottingham Tram Station Guessing Game. This game requires you to name as many of the 50 Nottingham tram stations as you can. Every time you type the name of a correct station its marker changes from red to green on the game's interactive map.

Another fun new online map game is Name that Nation. In this very simple game a country is highlighted on an interactive globe and you simply need to name the country. You can play global or regional versions of the game. So if your world geography is a little poor you can try to play a more localized game (for example try naming the ten North American countries).  

You can find hundreds of other online map and geography games using the Maps Mania games tag.

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