How to play

Every puzzle names one city — you’re told its country and continent, never its latitude. Guess other cities to close in on it; the target itself is never an option. Each guess reports three things: how far off you are in degrees of latitude, whether the target lies north or south of your guess, and which of five closeness bands that distance falls into.

Scoring a guess

The distance is the absolute difference in latitude between your guess and the target — purely north/south, so a guess directly east or west of the target on the same parallel scores as an exact match. One degree of latitude is about 111 km anywhere on Earth, so the band a guess lands in is a genuine measure of real-world distance, not an abstract score.

The five bands

Winning and losing

You get 6 guesses. Land within 0.75° of the target’s latitude — comfortably inside the SUPER CLOSE band — and you win the day. Run out of guesses first and the puzzle reveals the target so you can see exactly how close you got.

Streaks, three games a day

Each day runs three separate puzzles per difficulty. Your daily streak stays alive as long as you win at least one of the three — you don’t need a clean sweep, and losing a later game the same day never undoes a streak you already kept with an earlier win.

A quick strategy note

Your first guess is free information, not a shot in the dark — pick a city whose latitude you’re confident about (a hometown, a capital, anywhere you can place within a few degrees) and use the direction and band it comes back with to decide where to search next. Bisecting the distance each guess, the way you’d play a number-guessing game, closes in far faster than guessing at random. The strategy guide goes deeper on how to think about it.