MapTap, an everyday geography game, is my new Wordle

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 wordplay has felt like a means to keep a streak alive. Instead, my friends and I are stuck on a new game, MapTapwhich is available both as application and on the web.

Each day, MapTap has five questions, each of which presents you with a city (or, occasionally, the location of a historical 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 global city like London, while the last clue might be an island nation in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. On subsequent questions, your score is multiplied by 2 or 3, so you end the five-question game with a score of 1,000. (Personally, I think any score above 900 is good enough, but some sick people aim for that perfect score.)

Like Wordle, you get a fun little text to copy and paste and send to 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 didn’t plan to write this article when I MapTap today, but I’m sharing my average score to show you that it’s okay not to know things. However, I’d 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 Sicily is. I try my best).

You don’t have to be a geography buff to start playing and enjoying this game, but in all fairness, the game tends to reward the type of people who are. Either way, what makes MapTap so enjoyable is that you really 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 but informative (I particularly liked a recent game that was about the life and travels of Ibn Battuta, a 14th-century explorer who spent most of his life traveling through Africa, Asia, and the Iberian Peninsula).

I appreciated other Wordle-like geography games like Worldleand especially Globalbut 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 — if you don’t know which countries border Turkmenistan, you’re not going to pull the names out of thin air. But in MapTap, when you’re stuck on an idea, 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. Disagree about whether its position Battle of Midway it is common knowledge. It’s fun.