A place name, a spinning globe, one tap
MapTap names a place and spins up a 3D globe. You rotate it, find the spot, and tap. The score is measured in kilometres from where the place really sits, so a confident wrong answer is expensive.
Most people can place a country and still be four hundred kilometres out on the city. MapTap scores the difference between the two.
The globe rewards the kind of knowledge that comes from maps rather than lists.
A round shows a place name, sometimes with a hint about what it is known for. You drag the globe until the spot is under the cursor and tap once. The distance between your tap and the real location becomes the score, and the true point is drawn on the globe beside yours.
A flat map distorts distance the further you get from the equator, and it hides the fact that the shortest route between two points crosses the top of the world. Rotating a sphere keeps those relationships intact, so a tap near the Arctic is judged the way it actually sits.
Naming the right country is worth very little if the tap lands on the wrong edge of it. Cities that share a coastline with a neighbour, or capitals that sit close to a border, punish a rough guess. Getting within a hundred kilometres usually means you knew the region rather than the country.
A wrong tap is more memorable than a right one. Seeing the true location a thousand kilometres east of where you tapped fixes that coastline in a way a list of capitals does not. Players who run several rounds tend to get measurably closer on the same continents.
Rotation, distance scoring and an honest reveal.
Drag to spin and scroll to zoom. The sphere keeps distances comparable across latitudes instead of stretching them at the edges of a flat map.
You commit with a single tap. There is no adjusting afterwards, which means the first confident placement is the one that counts.
Distance, not a letter grade. A tap two hundred kilometres away and a tap two thousand away are different results with different lessons.
The map draws your tap and the true location together with a line between them, so the size of the miss is visible rather than stated.
Read the place, find it, commit.
Some rounds add a short hint about the location. Use it to decide which continent to bring into view first.
Spin the globe so the likely coastline is facing you, then zoom until the country fills the view.
Place the marker and commit. The reveal shows the true point and the distance between the two, then the next round begins.
Three players on getting closer.
I used to name the country and stop. Now I zoom until I can see the coastline, and my average miss dropped from about a thousand kilometres to three hundred.
The rotation is the part that teaches. Students who only ever see a flat map have no instinct for how the northern routes bend.
We compare distances after each round. Losing by forty kilometres on a city neither of us has visited is the best part.
Scoring, difficulty and how the globe behaves.
One place name, one tap, and a distance to live with until the next round.
Find the spot