Have You Had Your Five a Day?
Cartographers generally agree that there are significant benefits to viewing at least five maps or globes every day. Regular map consumption can help improve your geographical awareness, strengthen your navigational muscles and provide essential nourishment for your inner explorer.
The 5 A Day campaign is based on advice from the International Geographical Union, which recommends playing at least one map game every day to lower the risk of geographical ignorance, chronic misplacement and embarrassing incidents of getting lost.
Fortunately, you don't need to swallow an entire atlas to get your daily geographical intake. Here are three nutritious map games to add to your daily cartographic diet.
1. KnowWhere: World Cities
Think of KnowWhere as your daily serving of geographical greens. Each day, you're presented with five cities and challenged to locate them on an unlabeled map. Drop a pin where you think each city belongs, then answer three questions about each location. The closer your pin is to the correct city, the more points you earn, with a bonus for identifying the right country. Choose Easy or Hard depending on your geographical fitness, or practise with a fixed selection of cities whenever you need an extra helping. It's a healthy combination of map-reading and trivia, guaranteed to put your world knowledge through its paces.
2. MapMinute
For those who prefer their geography served with a generous helping of history, MapMinute offers five historical clues every day. Your task is to identify where each event happened by placing a pin on a satellite globe. Each answer is worth up to 200 points, depending on how close you get to the correct location, giving you a maximum daily intake of 1,000 points. There's no timer, so you can take your time digesting each clue before discovering the correct location and reading the story behind it. With historical discoveries and source material included, MapMinute provides a particularly wholesome blend of geography and history.
3. Licence to Locate
If your geographical diet could use a little international intrigue, Licence to Locate is shaken, not stirred. This unofficial atlas documents 401 James Bond filming locations, but its Daily Dossier is the real daily supplement. Each day, you must identify five locations from the Bond films by clicking their positions on a map. Points are awarded according to how close your guesses are to the actual filming locations. From familiar city streets to exotic beaches and far-flung hideaways, you'll discover whether your knowledge of 007's globe-trotting adventures is genuinely world-class or merely a case of geographical wishful thinking.
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