A geography game that asks you to point, not to pick
What it is
Every day at midnight, five geography questions go up. Everyone in the world gets the same five, in their own language, and answers them the same way: by tapping the point on a satellite globe where the answer is. The closer the tap, the more it scores. One round takes about four minutes.
There are no multiple-choice options, and that is the whole design. A list of four answers tests whether you can recognise a name. A globe tests whether you know where a place actually is, which is a different and more honest question. You can be certain the Burj Khalifa is in Dubai and still be eighty miles out, and the score will say so.
Because the answer is a point rather than a word, the game translates without becoming a different puzzle. A Spanish player tapping Stratford-upon-Avon and an English player tapping it score identically, so there is one leaderboard rather than six.
How a question is made
There are 365 questions in the bank, written by hand, one at a time. Each carries a prompt, a verified coordinate, the answer, and a fact worth knowing that is shown after you guess. The fact is the part the game exists for: a round you forget taught you nothing.
Every coordinate is looked up against a source and recorded to at least two decimal places. A coordinate that has been rounded to a whole degree is flagged by the validator, because a round number is usually a guess rather than a reading.
Each question also declares how precise it expects you to be. Asking for a country is not the same test as asking for a single building, so the two are scored on different curves rather than on one curve that is unfair to both.
A build fails if two questions share an answer, if two targets sit close enough that one tap would score full marks on both, if a prompt names the place it is asking for, or if a coordinate looks rounded. These are not style rules. Each of them is a bug that shipped once and is now impossible to ship again.
The bank is append-only. Once a day has been served its five questions are pinned, so adding new questions can never change a round somebody has already played.
How scoring works
A perfect day is exactly 1,000 points and always will be. The five questions are weighted 1×, 1×, 2×, 3×, 3×, so the later questions are worth more, and a flawless round on any day is comparable with a flawless round on any other.
Distance decides almost everything. Speed is worth 5 of the 100 points on a question — enough to break a tie between two players who both knew the answer, never enough to let a fast guess beat a slow piece of knowledge. There is a test that asserts this, because a curve that broke it shipped once.
The clock runs on the server and starts when you reach a question, not when you answered the previous one. Reading the fact card is free. Thinking is free for two minutes; after that the score decays, which is aimed at a second browser tab rather than at a hard question.
What it does not do
No account, ever. No email, no password, no date of birth. Your progress is kept in your own browser and backed by a random identifier; a twelve-character recovery code moves it to another device.
Teacher mode has class codes and no pupil accounts. We hold no record of a child. That is a fixed constraint, not a shortcut we intend to fix later.
Private groups are free and have no member cap. Every competitor charges for them, which is charging rent on your own word of mouth.
No streak you can only lose, no countdown on anything you can buy, no invented players to make a quiet leaderboard look busy, and no selling you a repair for a loss we engineered. The published list of what we refuse is longer and more specific than this paragraph.
Who runs it
TapWhere is made by one person, Younes El-Haiti, and is funded by advertising and by an optional Pro subscription. The daily round is free and always will be: it is the product, not a trial of it.
Questions, corrections and complaints all reach the same inbox, and a wrong coordinate is the most useful message you can send.