As Wordle celebrates its fifth anniversary, we have to be honest with ourselves: Are we still having fun, thousands of Wordles later? Sometimes, we are — but other times, the daily word game has felt like a means to keep a streak alive. Instead, my friends and I have gotten hooked on a new game, MapTap, which is available both as an app and on the web.
Every day, MapTap has five questions, each one presenting you with a city (or, occasionally, the site of a historic event or battle) to tap on the map. You get a score between 0 and 100 on each clue, depending on how close you are.
Each question gets progressively more difficult, so the first clue might be a major world city like London, while the final clue might be an island nation in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. On the later questions, your score gets multiplied by 2 or 3, so you finish the five-question game with a score out of 1,000. (Personally, I think any score over 900 is pretty good, but some sickos are gunning for that perfect score.)
Like Wordle, you get a fun little text to copy and paste and send in your group chats. Here’s mine from today, for example:
www.maptap.gg June 18
100🎯 90🎉 97🔥 85🌟 63🤨
Final score: 828
(No, I did not plan on writing this article when I did the MapTap today, but I am sharing my middling score to show you that it is okay to not know things. However, I would like to state for the record that I know where Indonesia is, but it’s a really big country. Also, I always forget exactly which island off the coast of Italy is Sicily. I’m trying my best.)
You don’t have to be a geography whiz to start playing and enjoying this game, but, in all fairness, the game does tend to reward the type of people who are. Either way, what makes MapTap so delightful is that you really do start to learn more about geography and improve your scores over time.
At the end of each day’s puzzle, the game gives you a few paragraphs about each location, which are casual yet informative (I particularly enjoyed a recent game that was themed around the life and travels of Ibn Battuta, a 14th-century explorer who spent most of his life traveling around Africa, Asia, and the Iberian Peninsula).
I’ve appreciated other Wordle-like geography games like Worldle, and especially Globle, but they haven’t stuck with me and my friends like MapTap. Sometimes, Worldle and Globle puzzles are simply unsolvable without Googling a world map to help you out — if you don’t know what countries border Turkmenistan, you’re not going to pull the names out of thin air. But on MapTap, when you’re stuck on a clue, you can at least take a stab at it and find out how close you were.
So, try playing MapTap and share your results with your most competitive group chat. Argue over whether the location of the Battle of Midway is common knowledge. It’s fun.
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