About Geodar

What it is

Geodar is a daily geography game. A round is one country and five clues, hardest first. You turn a globe to the country you think it is and lock it. The fewer clues you needed, the more it scores. There are five countries a day, the same for everyone, and an endless run for when that isn't enough. How to play has the full rules.

Why it's built this way

Your own knowledge is the game. Nothing on the screen points you at the answer. There's no hot and cold signal to follow, no clock to beat, and no list to pick from. There's a clue, a globe and what you know. When you're wrong the game tells you one thing, how far off you were, and lets you think again.

Every country ends on something worth knowing. The clues are written to be gettable, and to be worth having read even when you don't get them. Each round finishes with a fact you might want to tell someone. This is the one for Antigua and Barbuda: "Nelson's Dockyard is the only Georgian naval dockyard still working anywhere in the world. Its deep, narrow bays, ringed by hills, sheltered the navy's ships from hurricanes."

A wrong answer should teach you something. A miss opens an easier clue about the same country, so by the end of a round you know five true things about a place, whether you found it or not.

How the clues are written and checked

Clues and facts are drafted with the help of AI, and none of them is trusted on that alone. Before a country joins the game, every clue, its fact and the place on the globe each have to match a source that was opened and written down. A line that can't be backed up is rewritten or dropped.

A few rules hold for every country:

• The first four clues never name the country. The fifth names it and says where it is.
• Clues run from hardest to easiest, so there's always a way in.
• Lines that would soon go out of date, such as whoever currently holds a record, are worded so they stay true or are left out.
• Each country is marked easy, medium or hard, and a day runs from easy to hard.

If we got something wrong

We work to get every line right, and we will still make mistakes. If you spot one, tell us through support@playgeodar.com. Say which country and which line, and send a source if you have one. We read every report, and when a line is wrong we fix it.

Honest numbers

Nothing about other players is made up. A day's crowd numbers only appear once at least 20 people have finished it. Until then the game shows your own result and nothing else.

Who runs it

Geodar is made and run by Ayden Blayne.

Geodar isn't connected with, or endorsed by, any of the countries, people, places or brands its clues mention. They're named as plain facts. To get in touch, use support@playgeodar.com.

Money

The game is free, and you never need an account to play it. It is paid for by ads from Google AdSense. We keep them off the globe while a round is being played, and the privacy page explains your choices.

No country, place, brand or person pays to appear in a clue, and money has no say in which countries are asked.

The globe

The globe is a simplified drawing made for a game. Its borders, coastlines and names aren't a statement about any territory, and a few very small countries can't be picked on it at all.

Credits

• Map data: Natural Earth, which is in the public domain.
• Flags: circle-flags, under the MIT licence.
• Type on these pages: Bricolage Grotesque, under the SIL Open Font License.