In game When you load into a round of a singleplayer game, you will see the interface pictured below. In a moving game there are several techniques for moving around. The most common is to click on the road in the direction you want to move towards. You can also use the movement arrows at the centre of the screen, these are particularly useful in rounds where the movement does not work properly. Finally you can also use the letters W and S to move forward and backwards respectively. You can use the arrows or the keyboard keys when you want to move with precision one panorama at a time. You can pan around by clicking and dragging the mouse and zoom in and out with the scroll wheel. Alternatively, you can use the zoom buttons in the bottom left. It is also possible to pan with the A and D keys, as well as the right and left directional arrows. In moving games you also have a few useful buttons in the bottom left. The “Return to start” button (hotkey R) sends you to the initial location of the round. This is a very important tool in moving games since you need to guess the initial location, not the one you are on when you make the guess. The “Set checkpoint/Return to checkpoint” button (hotkey C) allows you to set a checkpoint at a location you have moved to, press the button again to return to the checkpoint. The “Undo move” button (hotkey Z) sends you back to your previous location after moving. This is especially useful when you accidentally move from a main road into a side road and it would be time consuming to go back with the normal movement. Hovering over the minimap opens it in a bigger size and you will see three new buttons on the top left, two arrows and a pin. You can use the arrows on the top left to resize the minimap. The pin button locks the minimap so it does not minimize after moving the mouse away. When you are ready to make your guess you can use the Guess button or press space to lock it in. The Compass The compass is one of the most important tools in order to properly pinpoint a round. Knowing the direction of a coastline, a mountain range, or a city skyline are very basic ways to make an educated regionguess, and knowing the exact angle of the road you are on is often crucial for finding the 5k. By default you will have the compass at the top of your screen, this compass is centred on the direction you are looking towards. You can turn on the classic compass in the settings menu. In the classic compass the red arrow points towards north and the white one towards south, relative to the direction you are looking at. When you look directly east, the compass will be perfectly horizontal with the red arrow pointing left. Which compass to use is a matter of personal preference. Geoguessr offers the option to show both compass at the same time, and we recommend using this setting. The classic compass is easier to read at a glance for most players, and the new compass offers more precision when trying to line a road up. A common technique to find the road angle is to look straight down with the compass pointing exactly north. Then the road on the map should be parallel to the direction of the road you see on your screen. The roadlines are usually the easiest way to compare the angle. This technique can also be used to find plausible roads or sections of road in a region if you do not know exactly which road you are on. Highways or coastal roads are some examples of locations where looking for the right road angle can lead to very close guesses. In this round there is information to know you are between the cities of La Paz and Oruro in a big divided road. With the road angle you can make an educated guess that you are likely in the green section, with a chance of being somewhere in the yellow section. You can discard the sections highlighted in red because the angle of the road is very different. The map In the Geoguessr context, a map is just a collection of locations published in the form of a playable map. Every gamemode, including those that do not specify it, uses locations exclusively from one map at a time. Geoguessr’s own official maps are not good for a variety of reasons. One of the most common complaints being how some small areas often are extremely over-represented in the official maps. Locations such as the Midway Atoll come up more often in “World” than entire countries. Luckily there is an active map making community that is constantly producing and updating high quality maps that we recommend playing instead. This corner of the Midway Atoll runway is one of the best known locations in the game due to it being extremely over-represented in Geoguessr’s official “World” map. To this effect, we released the Plonk It Map Directory, a page where we recommend the best maps to play in a variety of categories, ranging from general gameplay to themed and novelty maps, with short descriptions to help you find maps that fit your needs. Finding maps within the Geoguessr website is also possible, the Community Maps page hosts the most liked and played community-made maps, as well as recently popular and new maps. It is important to mention that the Geoguessr map maker does not allow users to manually select more than 135,000 locations. When you encounter maps with more locations than that, it means the map has been made using the polygonal tool in Geoguessr’s own mapmaker. This tool yields low-quality maps, and therefore we strongly recommend not playing these. There are some concepts that show up in the Map Directory as well as in map descriptions that are not necessarily intuitive: Pinpointability: Pinpointable maps are those where every location is placed on a distinct map feature, such as an intersection or a bridge, so that you can achieve a perfect score in every round if you put in the effort. Non-pinpointable maps may have locations in long straight stretches of road or sections with broken coverage, making it impossible to make accurate guesses in some rounds. We therefore recommend using pinpointable maps for moving games. Handpicked/Arbitrarily generated: Handpicked maps are those in which every location has been selected by the mapmaker. In arbitrarily generated maps, locations are chosen by a computer program according to parameters established by the map maker. Arbitrarily picked maps frequently use the term “AI Generated”, although there is no AI involved, just regular computer algorithms. Distribution: How to distribute locations between countries and regions is a topic of debate among the map making community. Things such as country size, coverage density, and diversity of landscapes are commonly used to determine how many locations a country has in a world map. A balanced distribution usually means that big countries are somewhat under-represented relative to their size, and small countries and territories are overrepresented in order to increase variety between rounds. Official/Unofficial coverage: Geoguessr is based on Google Street View; therefore, the term “official coverage” refers to imagery released by Google themselves. There is also privately published imagery in Google Maps; this is referred to as “unofficial coverage”. This includes photospheres, which are 360 degree pictures typically taken with a cellphone. You can also encounter unofficial car coverage (“Ari”) taken in a way similar to Google’s own coverage, but usually with much lower image quality. Competitive maps will always feature exclusively official coverage. Pinpointing a round Pinpointable maps are those that have every location close enough to a distinct feature on the map so that a perfect score is achievable in every round. This does not mean that the information will always be visible from the starting location; moving around may be necessary in some rounds to get a perfect score. The most common “pinpoints” in maps are intersections, the middle point between two bends in the road, bridges, and railroad crossings. In urban rounds, street names will be the most common way to pinpoint a location. Business names and other points of interest can be unreliable, especially outside of developed countries, and while they can be used to pinpoint some rounds, they will rarely be the intended way to solve a round in a pinpointable map. Play 00:00 00:51 Mute Settings Enter fullscreen 00:00 An example 5k in a pinpointable map. In more rural rounds, there will sometimes not be any written information to confirm the pinpoint, and the player needs to use a combination of moving around to find information about the region, and using the compass and the environment to form a mental image of how the round looks like in the map. Finding directional signs towards nearby towns or cities, as well as finding road numbers are some of the most effective strategies towards nailing down the possible area where a round can be. Fast movement There is a technique used by players to cover great distances in a short amount of time. This is generally called “fast moving”. To fast move you click one of the arrow keys in the desired direction, and then hold down either the space or enter key. This will simulate clicking that arrow at an extremely fast rate, moving you in that direction faster than with any other method. As the images may not have time to load properly, this technique is most useful on long open roads without information. Experienced players have however learned to use it even in information dense areas to cover short distances saving just a few seconds every time. It is important to mention that you should only use the space key to move before you have placed your marker on the map, as it is also the shortcut for guessing. This is why the enter key is preferred by most players, although it has one drawback; it cannot be used in multiplayer games unless the chat is disabled in the settings. Scoring The score you obtain in a round of Geoguessr naturally depends on how close or far away you guess from the correct location. However, there are some technical details that are important to know. First of all, the scoring is not linear, instead, the score drop-off is exponential. This means that the same distance will have a bigger impact on the score the closer you are to the location. Being 30 km away in a world map loses you roughly 100 points, but the difference between being 1000 and 1030 km away is less than 50 points. There is also a parameter based on how much ground the map covers. This means that maps of singular countries have much harsher scoring than world or continental maps. Guesses below 25 meters will always net a perfect score in every map. The perfect score radius gets bigger with the size of the map, going up to a range of 140 to 200 meters in world maps. One last detail that is worth remembering, is that due to the Mercator Projection used on the minimap, distances will be exaggerated towards the poles, and will conversely be bigger than they appear close to the Equator. The equation used for calculating the score. “Distance” naturally refers to the distance between the guess and the correct location. “Max Distance” is the diagonal of the smallest rectangle possible that would contain every location in the map. Coverage Map Since the game is based on Google Street View, the countries that show up will correspond to the countries covered on Street View. Knowing what countries have coverage and which ones don’t is a basic piece of information to have, since there are some areas of the world, such as Africa and central America in which only a few countries will appear ingame. You can click on this image to enlarge it. This map is up to date as of November 2024. You can check the extent of the Street View coverage in this website. Frequently Asked Questions You can find more information about related topics in Geoguessr’s Frequently Asked Questions page.