CastleGuessr
I had determined not to post about Castle Map despite it being written about extensively elsewhere. There are already hundreds of maps of castles around the world and, although I have nothing against AI-generated maps, this one struck me as particularly uninteresting.
That first impression wasn't helped by the site's design. Castle Map takes the illegible grey-text-on-a-black-background AI design trend to even greater lengths by applying the same colour scheme to the map itself, with dark grey land set against a black sea. Not only are the menu options in the legend almost impossible to read, but the map itself is barely legible.
However, today I discovered that Castle Map includes a neat GeoGuessr-style game: CastleGuessr.
CastleGuessr is surprisingly fun to play, especially if, like me, you suddenly discover that you know more than you thought about castle design and architecture, and can tell your English forts from your French châteaux and your Japanese castles. It turns out that a lifetime of watching historical documentaries, period dramas and fantasy films has left me with a surprisingly useful knowledge of the world's fortifications.
Unfortunately, CastleGuessr appears to have been designed by the same AI as Castle Map, so it is very difficult to see your grey crosshair cursor against the grey-coloured map. Which is a shame, because the whole point of the game is to click as accurately as possible on the map. It might help therefore if the cursor were, say, a different colour from the map.
Even with its frustrating colour scheme, CastleGuessr is worth a look. It's a clever twist on the GeoGuessr formula and a reminder that castles are often as distinctive as the cities and landscapes that surround them.
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