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🗺 Help - Where In The World?

Why did you make this?

I suck at word games like scrabble, crosswords, and the like. So Gemini native games like Spellbinding, while cool, are not appealing to me. I am however good at geography, and have been playing Worldle with friends for a few months:

WORLDLE

I wondered if I could make a port of the game to Gemini. Where In The World is the result

Where is a new puzzle available?

A new puzzle is available every day at 0:00 GMT. New puzzles generate automatically every day. The same puzzle is used for everyone, every day, so you can share and compete with friends if you'd like.

Where can I play previous puzzles?

You sure can. There is a link on the home page to play any previous puzzle.

How many countries and territories are there?

242

Why isn't [blank] a valid guess?

I really don't want to get into the politics of "what's a country" so I'm using ISO 3166-1 standard for the country code list. I also need to have a free, high resolution, monochrome map of the country, so certain valid territories have fallen off.

What is the proximity percent?

It's a concise way to represent the "closeness" of your guess. If your guess is at the opposite side of the world, you'll get 0%, if you guess the country, you'll get 100%.

How are distances computed?

The distance displayed for a guess is the distance between the center of the guessed country, and the actual country. For instance, the distance between United States and Canada is 2260 km even if they are next to each other.

There are two reasons for this::

It's much easier to compute distance like this instead trying to do the math about borders.
You can deduce information about the size of the target country with this information.

Will you tell me the answer to today's puzzle?

No.

I have feedback

Is your feedback a subtle way to ask me the answer to today's puzzle?

No

Cool, then email me

How is the country for each day's puzzle selected? I swear I'm seeing a pattern

For a time there was a pattern, though I doubt anyone noticed. Originally, I used a simple algorithm that used the day of the year as a seed to randomly pick a country. Unfortunately this means that the puzzle for 2023-01-01 is the same as 2024-01-01. Essentially the same countries were used in the same order, each year. This was fixed in 2024-03-17. To allow people to see what previous games looked like, games before March 17th 2024 use this older algorithm. Going forward there are no repeating patterns to the puzzles.

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