Where in the World, my super nerdy geography game

The Game Room
1

How to play Where in the World.

Go to www.mapcrunch.com. Select “all” countries. Select the “stealth” option, which hides all location information. Hit Go!

Where are you? Read any signage. The alphabet is one clue, the place names another. Street sign styles change. “Drive” around for a while. Take a look at advertising signs. Trucks often have an internet address. Which side of the road is the traffic driving on?

In the middle of a coniferous forest? You’re probably in Estonia. Drive around a bit. If all the vowels have umlauts, this backs up your suspicion.

Look at the image date (bottom left corner). Is the landscape dry and brown in February? Maybe you’re in the southern hemisphere.

Another self-imposed rule: if I’m in Australia or the US, I should also hazard a guess as to region or state. Outback WA looks JUST LIKE Outback Qld.

Architectural clues - grey bunkers? Former Soviet country. Brightly painted neat wooden houses? Scandinavia.

I can’t tell you how enjoyable this is to me. The best part of traveling is seeing how other people live. I’m also getting really good at guessing what country I’m in. My gut instinct turns out to be right most of the time.

Let me know what you think!

2

Oh, I forgot: unselect stealth to reveal your location (lower right corner).

3

First picture - somewhere in Northern Europe
One click - a sign in Dutch
Four clicks along the road and there’s a sign to tell me I’m in Piershil.

Second picture - a vineyard in Southern Europe
Spin around and zoom in, I’m close to here

4

Of course, third time was the charm

:eek:

5

Let’s see… somewhere kind of dingy. Moved up and down the streets for a while- noticed that all writing was Cyrillic… that makes it likely that we’re in Eastern Europe or Russia.

Saw blonde chick with smokin’ body crossing street on street-view. Nice.

Finally spot incompletely blurred license plate- notice Ukrainian flag left side. Still don’t know where in Ukraine I am.

End up un-stealthing myself; I’m in Odessa.

6

I’m on a long, straight divided highway, surrounded by trees, mostly pines. The car way way ahead of me seems to be facing away from me, so traffic is on the right. Lines painted on the road in a North American style, too. No signs for MILES. Finally, I come across…a moose crossing sign. With the English word ATTENTION at the top. Then I stumble across a kilometer marker sign. So, Canada, but not Quebec.

Aaaaand…it’s New Brunswick 2, in Codys, New Brunswick.

7

I got dropped into the country side… turn around… there’s a giant road sign that says “FRANCE”. I think I’ve got the hang of it, George.

8

I’m southbound on a four lane divided highway with traffic driving on the right. License plates are blurred out but seem to be white and wide, so European style. Terrain seems mostly flat.

Speed limit is 70 kph. Found a road sign with POZOR and an image indicating a low shoulder. That translates to CAUTION in Czech.

A truck has the slogan “Stavební materiály z nejlepší rodiny” on the side. That is Czech for “Building materials from the best families” and has a web address with a .cz top level domain. Czech Republic confirmed.

Passed under a bridge. Sign for Siko Koupleny, a Czech retailer of tile and bathroom fixtures. In English it says Exit 33 and Vacuum Technology for the world.

Finally a road direction sign. I’m on a highway that goes through Prostějov (Hwy 46 and E462) enroute to Brno.
Indeed, address shows as R46, Drzovice, Olomoucky kraj, Cz Rep. Drzovice is northern suburb of Prostějov.

9

It set me down on a 2-lane road in a heavily wooded area. It took me 3 or 4 minutes before I found my first road sign…it had an umlaut, so that narrowed things down to probably only of of the seven continents…

A couple minutes later another sign put me somewhere in southern Sweden, and a few minutes later I was able to pinpoint my location as being about a mile northwest of Fristad (along route 42).

That was rather fun. I’m bookmarking the site now :slight_smile:

My second attempt has put me somewhere in Asia. Unfortunately, there is not a lick of Latin script to be seen anywhere, so my Google-searching abilities are not going to be of much help just now… :slight_smile:

10

I’m on a gravel road between a river and some woods. Not a lot of clues here. Someplace temperate but I could be anywhere rural in most of Europe or North America. It actually reminds me of the part of New England I grew up in.

Travel along the road and there’s a boat docked on the river. I can’t maneuver around to see its name but it’s a private recreational boat so I’m going to assume I’m somewhere in Western Europe, the United States, or Canada.

Travel a little more down the road and there’s a sign at the intersection. Farsund and Vanse are down the road. That sounds German or Scandinavian. This place seems a little too rural for Germany so I’m going to guess Sweden.

Unclick the stealth and I’m in on Fylkesveg 679, in Grimsby, Vest-Agder, Norway.

11

Single lane road through rolling farmland. At an intersection, there’s a sign saying Westell something, another sign saying Another Stock Rock Farm with a funny-looking phone number below it, so I think I’m in England.

Aaaand sheep.

Kakepuku Road, Te Mawhai, Auckland, NZ.

Good lord. I may never leave the home again…

12

Is there any way to get that site to give me a map? I know I can un-stealth to see the name of where I am, but after prowling around for a while it would be nice exactly where I am on a map.

13

That’s the challenge…to figure out where you are using the clues you find around you, then to eventually zero in on yourself in Google Maps…

14

I’m stuck on a gravel road somewhere in the middle of the Lithuanian countryside - I’m only guessing Lithuania because I came across a homemade sign at the entrance of a driveway that says “parduodu medu”, which is Lithuanian for honey. Now I’ve been traversing country roads for 20 mins with no end in site and no signs of civilization aside from a farmhouse here and there.
ZZZZZ.

15

On another gravel road, this time with overgrown fields around me. Another temperate zone. There’s a roadsign with no words on it indicating a curve ahead and the telephone poles look strange. So most likely somewhere in Europe.

Check out some farm houses but I don’t see any writing or other clear clues. I don’t see any vehicles but one farm has a satellite dish. I have a feeling this may be France but it’s just a hunch at this point.

Travel down the road a ways more and find a round sign with a 50 on it. A little ways further there’s a sign with a bus on it. Still no writing.

A man is out in his front yard. Bonjour, Monsieur. Pouvez-vous me dire ou je suis, s’il vous plait. He doesn’t answer. French people are snooty.

Travel down the road some more. Start traveling by longer jumps. A few more houses and signs but no new clues. But there’s a house with a car in the driveway. I zoom in on the license plate but Google has blurred it out.

I keep leaping down the road. I eventually come to an intersection. No signs but it looks like a better road. I follow it in hopes of coming to a town. I eventually see a tall tower in the distance. I hope it’s a town. As I get close I see other buidlings. This looks good.

A sign at last. Svedriske? Ukotas? With all kinds of weird accent marks? I revise my previous guess on France. I think I’m in Eastern Europe. Poland? Hungary? The Czech Republic?

There’s a church as I enter the town. It has onion domes. So someplace in the Balkans perhaps.

I travel through the town. It’s a dismal place. Little ramshackle houses and big cement block buildings. The streets turn to dirt as soon as you get off the main street. Very few cars and their license plates are all blurred. No businesses or advertising that I can find. I finally find one building with a sign on its front. The windows are broken and boarded over. The sign says Kavine Vacykla. A closed movie theatre? I don’t know. There’s another sign on the side: Promonines Prekes. Again, this means nothing to me.

I travel down another street. Flagpoles in front of a building but no flags. I see a mail box: Pastas. What language is this?

A sign on the side of a building: Viskas Jusu Namams Ir Buiciai. Another building I think might be a public restroom. The sign says Laisves G 6. Another business with boarded up windows: Maisto Prekes. Apparently this is a bad town for people in the Prekes business.

I see a street sign. Zarasai is 27 (kilometers?) to the left and Ignalina is 27 to the right. I’ve never heard of either place.

Like the town itself, I abandon hope. I unclick the stealth to see where I am.

Ranenay, Utenos Apskritis, Lithuania.

16

Yeah, I get that, but the first one I did was in some vineyard with streets barely wide enough for a bicycle. I traveled around a bit and only found one stop sign. When I de-stealthed, all it would tell me was what town I was in. I could zoom into the town on Google Maps, but that didn’t make for an exact match.

I would like a button on mapcrunch that would actually turn the street view into a map. I wanted to see exactly where I’d been, what turns I could have taken to get to a main road, that sort of thing.

17

First image I knew was Hong Kong. It was the side of a bus with ad on it. I couldn’t really read it but a web address had dot hk in it.
Then a place in Ireland fooled me into thinking it was England. A new housing development that had a big “sale” sign on 7 bedroom houses.

Then I drove about St. Petersburg for awhile and although I was pretty sure I was in Russia, I had no idea where.

18

I’m on a narrow, badly-paved back road. There’s a varied mixture of establishments of no fixed architectural style, mostly favouring the hollow concrete block as building material. There’s one quite nice colourful two-story house but the rest look pretty poor.

The only sign is Tortilleria Lupita and is on a small business - looking rather like a bicycle repair shop - so I’m pretty sure I’m in Latin America. It is certainly not the restaurant by that name in Amarillo TX.

After wandering the streets for a while I get my first solid hint, a building labelled “Servicious de Salud de Yucutan” which appears to be Yucutan Health Services or similar, so we’re in Yucutan state Mexico somewhere. I see the spires of a large cathedral in the middle distance, so let’s head over there.

On the way I see a road sign pointing to Merida, the largest town in Yucutan state. So I’m presumably near but not in Merida.

Now I’m beside the front of the cathedral (Google don’t seem to have driven down the road that actually goes in front of it) and I’ve already seen “Santa Teresa” in the ironwork side gate - that’s too common a church name to be of any use though.

But now my roadsigns have a choice, straight on for Merida or right for Ichmul. So looking at Google maps I think I’m in the town of Peto, or at least in the Municpality of Tzucacab … and the reveal shows I’m right, it’s Peto!

That was fun.

19

I agree, that would be a good addition!

Thanks for playing along, everyone! I found myself in Andorra yesterday, which was very satisfying to guess correctly. I also ended up in Antarctica at one point - the penguins are a dead giveaway.

20

The OP is a right bastard.

I can’t stop playing this. Last time I ended up in a village in Romania.