What kind of game this is
What is a GeoGuessr game?
A geography game with the quiz taken out: you are standing on a street somewhere on Earth, and the only question is where.
The idea is GeoGuessr's. The Swedish developer Anton Wallén released it in May 2013 as a side project: it dropped players at a random spot in Google Street View and scored them on how close to it they could put a pin on a world map. A whole genre grew up around it, from geography lessons to streamers who can name a country from a glimpse of a road, and much of that genre is free. When people search for a free GeoGuessr, GeoGuessr unlimited or GeoGuessr unblocked, they mean the same game with no subscription and no daily cap.
LuckyGuessr is one of those free GeoGuessr alternatives, with one thing the others leave out: luck. Every round hands you a free case, and the case drops a hint, from the half of the world you are in to the exact spot. The streets are Apple's Look Around imagery, and the bank holds 2,016 places in 36 countries across Europe, North America, Oceania and Asia. A run is 5 rounds of 3 minutes, and runs are unlimited.
- real streets in the bank
- 2,016
- countries they are in
- 36
- points for a perfect pin, a 5K
- 5,000
The name
Why the game is called LuckyGuessr
A lucky guess is the answer you could not quite explain but got right anyway, and every round of LuckyGuessr has one built in. The game launched as CaseGuessr, after the "GeoGuessr with cases" runs on ohnePixel's streams, where street guessing met CS2 case openings. The cases stayed. The new name says what they are for: a case might hand you nothing more than a hemisphere, or it might hand you the answer.
Reading a street
How to tell where you are from a street
The clues GeoGuessr players read first, roughly in the order they cut the world down.
The sun
At solar noon, when the sun is at its highest, it is always due south of anywhere north of the Tropic of Cancer and always due north of anywhere south of the Tropic of Capricorn. Work out which way a street runs and its shadows give away your hemisphere. Between the tropics the sun can pass on either side.
The side of the road
About a third of the world's people live where traffic keeps left: Britain and Ireland, Japan, much of southern and eastern Africa, much of South and Southeast Asia, Australia and New Zealand. Parked cars, bus stops and which side the driver sits on all give it away.
The writing
Scripts narrow the world fastest: Thai, Korean Hangul, Georgian, Hebrew and Greek each point to one country or close to it. Within the Latin alphabet single letters help: ø is Danish, Norwegian or Faroese, ł is Polish, ő and ű are Hungarian.
Number plates
Plates are designed country by country. A blue strip down the left edge with a country code is the European Union's format. White in front and yellow behind is the British pattern; yellow at both ends usually means the Netherlands, Luxembourg or Israel.
Road paint
Yellow centre lines separate the traffic across North America and in Norway, while most of Europe paints them white. Dashes, edge lines and roadside marker posts (bollards, to players) differ by country too, and experienced players learn them like handwriting.
Phones and web addresses
A shop sign can name the country outright. A web address ending .de, .fr or .jp does it, and so does a phone number if you know the dialling codes: +44 is Britain, +33 France, +61 Australia.
In LuckyGuessr the bank does some of that narrowing for you. Only 7 of its 36 countries keep left (Australia, Hong Kong, Ireland, Japan, New Zealand, Singapore and United Kingdom), so a car on the left side of the road rules out most of the map at once. And every place south of the equator is in Australia and New Zealand: when a case drops the Southern Hemisphere, that is the whole shortlist.
The same reading is a real skill outside the game. Open-source investigators, the researchers and journalists who check where a photo or a video was really taken, work down much the same list: signs for the language, road markings and street furniture for the country, then satellite imagery to find the exact corner.
Shadows do more than give away a hemisphere. If you know when a photo was taken, the length of a shadow against the height of whatever casts it gives the height of the sun, and at any moment there is only a ring of places on Earth where the sun stands at that height. The direction of the shadow then shows which way the camera faced. Bellingcat's investigators use exactly this to rule places out before they search the satellite imagery.
Latitude and longitude
Why latitude was easy and longitude took a clock
The Exact Latitude and Exact Longitude drops look like twins. For most of history one was a matter of looking up, and the other was the hardest problem at sea.
Latitude from the sky
In the Northern Hemisphere, the height of the Pole Star above the horizon is your latitude, to within about a degree. The south has no bright pole star, so sailors found the pole from the Southern Cross, or measured the sun at noon and looked its height up in tables for the date.
Longitude from a clock
The Earth turns 15 degrees an hour, one degree every 4 minutes. Carry a clock set to home time, note when the sun is highest where you are, and the difference is your longitude. At the equator a degree is about 111 km, so a clock one minute out puts you 28 km off.
How GPS does it
A receiver times radio signals from at least four satellites, each carrying atomic clocks. Light covers about 300 metres in a microsecond, so the clocks must agree to billionths of a second. Relativity alone would pull them apart by about 38 microseconds a day, more than 11 km of error a day, so each satellite's clock is set to run slow before launch. Under open sky a phone is usually good to about 5 metres; tall buildings and trees make it worse.
People crossed oceans long before either instrument. Polynesian navigators settled islands across thousands of kilometres of the Pacific by reading star paths, ocean swells and the flight of birds. In 1976 Mau Piailug, a navigator from the Micronesian island of Satawal, guided the voyaging canoe Hōkūleʻa some 2,300 miles (3,700 km) from Hawaii to Tahiti with no compass, no chart and no instrument at all, steering by where the stars rose and by the ocean swells.
Three centuries of it
From the Longitude Act to LuckyGuessr
1714
The Longitude Act
The British Parliament offers up to £20,000, a fortune at the time, for a way to find longitude at sea to within half a degree.
1761
H4 goes to sea
John Harrison's sea watch H4 sails on a trial voyage to Jamaica. When it arrives in January 1762 it is only about 5 seconds slow: roughly a nautical mile of longitude.
1884
A line through Greenwich
Delegates from 25 nations meet in Washington and vote 22 to 1, with France and Brazil abstaining, for the meridian through the Royal Observatory at Greenwich as longitude zero. Every longitude on the map still counts from it.
1978
The first GPS satellite
The United States launches the first Navstar GPS satellite. Civilians get the full precision only in May 2000, when the deliberate error called Selective Availability is switched off and civilian fixes become about ten times more accurate overnight.
2007
Street View
Google launches Street View in five American cities, and the planet slowly becomes somewhere you can stand from a browser.
2013
GeoGuessr
Anton Wallén releases GeoGuessr: a random Street View, a world map and one question.
Now
LuckyGuessr
LuckyGuessr plays on Look Around, the street imagery Apple added to its maps in 2019, and puts a case in every round: a lucky guess you can open.
Your inner map
How your brain knows where you are
Long before satellites, you carried a positioning system of your own, and a game like this one puts it to work.
Place cells
In 1971 John O'Keefe found neurons in the rat hippocampus that fire only when the animal is in one particular spot. Together they make a map of the places it knows.
Grid cells
In 2005 May-Britt and Edvard Moser found cells next door, in the entorhinal cortex, that fire in a hexagonal grid as an animal moves: a coordinate system. The three shared the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
The Knowledge
London's black-cab drivers must learn some 25,000 streets to get their licence. In 2000 Eleanor Maguire's team at University College London found that licensed drivers had a larger rear hippocampus than other people, and that it grew with their years on the job.
The maths of a pin
How a pin is scored, and what each case is worth
Every round is scored on one number: the distance along the Earth's surface from your pin to the real spot.
| 150 m off | 5,000 points |
|---|---|
| 1 km off | 4,998 points |
| 10 km off | 4,975 points |
| 100 km off | 4,756 points |
| 500 km off | 3,894 points |
| 1,000 km off | 3,033 points |
| 2,500 km off | 1,433 points |
| 5,000 km off | 410 points |
| The far side of the world, 20,015 km | 0 points |
The points fall fastest near the target and flatten out with distance: they halve about every 1,386 km, so a pin in the right country keeps most of the round and a pin on the wrong continent still earns a little. One consequence is worth knowing. Say you are torn between two towns 2,000 km apart. Pin one of them and you score about 4,975 if you are right and 1,839 if you are wrong, 3,407 on average. Pin halfway and you score 3,033 every time. The curve sags in the middle, so committing beats splitting the difference.
| Hemisphere | 50% |
|---|---|
| Latitude zone, 30° N to 50° N | 13% |
| Longitude zone, 30° wide | 8.3% |
| 2,500 km circle | 3.8% |
| 1,500 km circle | 1.4% |
| 500 km circle | 0.15% |
| 250 km circle | 0.038% |
| The gold 5K | one spot |
- cases that drop the gold 5K
- 3 in 100
- runs that open at least one 5K
- 1 in 7
- the distance that halves a pin's points
- 1,386 km
Playing
A method for LuckyGuessr
Four habits, each one taken from the sections above.
- 01
Split the world before looking for details
Sun, side of the road and script come first. Each rules out most of the map in seconds, before you spend any of the clock on detail.
- 02
Then read the words
Signs, shopfronts, plates, web addresses and phone numbers can name the country outright. In the first 3 rounds you have 12 steps: spend them walking toward a junction, where the signs are. The last 2 rounds are played from one spot, so read everything in view.
- 03
Open the case early
The clock runs while the case spins, and a hint is worth the most before you have settled on a region. Skip the animation when time is short.
- 04
Commit to a place
The scoring rewards a confident pin. If it is between two places, pick the likelier one rather than the middle, then zoom in: within 150 metres the round is a 5K.
Words
GeoGuessr terms, explained
- Free GeoGuessr
- What people call the free games in the GeoGuessr genre: the same drop onto a street and pin on a map, with no subscription. LuckyGuessr is one, with hints.
- GeoGuessr unlimited
- A free GeoGuessr game with no daily cap on rounds. LuckyGuessr has none: a run is 5 rounds, and the next one starts whenever you like.
- GeoGuessr with cases
- The stream format LuckyGuessr grew out of, where every round came with a case opening. It was also this game's first name, CaseGuessr.
- 5K
- A perfect round, worth 5,000 points. In LuckyGuessr it takes a pin within 150 metres, or the gold 5K from a case.
- Meta
- Players' word for a clue learned from the imagery itself rather than from the world: a camera generation, a blur, the capture car's shadow. It is often stretched to cover any learned country tell.
- Bollard
- A roadside marker post. Each country designs its own, so players learn them as tells.
- Coverage
- Where street imagery exists. Apple's Look Around covers fewer countries than Street View, which is why LuckyGuessr's bank spans 36 countries.
- No move
- A round played from one spot, with no walking. LuckyGuessr's last 2 rounds are no-move rounds; you can still turn and zoom.
- Antipode
- The point exactly opposite yours, through the centre of the Earth and 20,015 km away over its surface. Most land has open ocean at its antipode; Spain and New Zealand are the famous exception.
- Great-circle distance
- The shortest path between two points on a sphere, and the distance every pin is scored on. It is why flights between Europe and North America curve toward the Arctic on a flat map.
Sources: Royal Museums Greenwich, Harrison's clocks and the longitude problem; Dava Sobel, Longitude (1995); International Meridian Conference, Washington, 1884: protocols of the proceedings; GPS.gov: GPS accuracy and Selective Availability; the White House statement of 1 May 2000; Neil Ashby, Relativity and the Global Positioning System, Physics Today 55 (2002); Polynesian Voyaging Society: Hōkūleʻa's history, and Ben Finney's account of the 1976 voyage to Tahiti; Bellingcat: Using the sun and the shadows for geolocation (2020), and ShadowFinder (2024); O'Keefe and Dostrovsky, Brain Research 34 (1971); Hafting, Fyhn, Molden, Moser and Moser, Nature 436 (2005); the Nobel Assembly at Karolinska Institutet, press release (2014); Maguire and colleagues, Navigation-related structural change in the hippocampi of taxi drivers, PNAS 97 (2000); Google Maps blog, Introducing Street View (29 May 2007); Apple, iOS 13 and Look Around (2019).