About GeoMiniGames
GeoMiniGames is a small set of quick, free geography games built on real, open data. There are four of them, each with a new daily puzzle at midnight UTC and an endless mode. There are no accounts; your streaks and stats stay in your browser.
How the games work
Population Guesser. You see a square of satellite imagery, 2, 5, 10 or 25 km across, and a rough idea of where in the world it is. Guess how many people live inside it. What counts is how many times too high or too low you were, not the raw difference, so a good guess for a village scores as well as one for a megacity. Exact is 1,000 points, twice off is about 800, ten times off about 333, and about 32 times off or more scores nothing. Hints cost part of the round: the country (−10%), a zoomed-out view (−10%) and night lights seen from space (−15%). Zoom into the picture with a scroll, a pinch or a double-tap.
Latitude Line. Two cities: which one is further north? Ten a day, 1,000 points each. The pairs are close in latitude and far apart on the map, and about half are chosen to trick you: mild Western Europe feels further south than it is.
Distance Guesser. How far apart are two cities, in a straight line over the Earth? Five a day, from neighbours to opposite sides of the planet. Scored like Population Guesser but stricter: twice off is about 700 points, ten times off is nothing.
Elevation Guesser. How high above sea level is the pin? Five a day, from below sea level to high plateaus. Each round scores on how many metres you were off: 50 m off is about 830 points, 500 m about 420, 3,000 m or more nothing. Hints: the country (−10%) and a zoomed-out view (−10%).
At the end of each daily you can share a spoiler-free grid of squares: 🟩 close, 🟨 near, 🟥 far off.
How the squares and pins are chosen
Random points would mostly land in the ocean or on empty land, so every puzzle was chosen ahead of time and balanced so each daily mixes easy and hard. Population squares cover 194 countries, from countryside to the densest megacity cores. Each square's population is the sum of a 90-metre population grid over exactly the area you see, and a square made it into the game only if a second, independent population model broadly agreed. Where the two disagree, nobody can be sure of the real number, and that wouldn't be a fair puzzle.
The pictures are recent images from the European Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellites, chosen to be as cloud-free as possible. Each pixel covers 10 m of ground, so you can read neighbourhoods and fields but not single houses. Heights come from the Copernicus 30-metre elevation model, which measures the surface, so forest canopy counts.
Honest limits
Population figures are model estimates, not head counts. They are very good for most places, but tiny remote populations and fast-changing areas carry more uncertainty. Country names follow Natural Earth's map of who controls what on the ground; disputed areas are named as territories.