Drill the map, not flashcards. Free, no account.
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Which of the five French dialing zones does a number belong to?
Can you locate all 22 provinces, 5 autonomous regions and 4 municipalities of China?
How well do you know the Spanish dialing codes?
Can you locate all 18 regions of France?
City Blocks lays a grid of squares over the world and asks you to put a city in every one of them. Name a city and its square fills in; name a second city in the same square and nothing happens. There is no timer, no scoring and no wrong answer, so the whole game is knowing which cities are worth a guess. That turns out to be a very different list from the cities you would name first, which is what this page is about.
One box, no rounds. Type into the box on the play screen. As soon as what you have typed matches a city in the list, the city is yours, its square turns green and the box clears. A name that matches nothing just sits there, so guessing costs nothing.
The grid is fixed, and it is measured in degrees. The squares are laid out from the equator and the prime meridian outwards, always in the same places, whatever you name. This is the difference from City Cover: east and west count here as much as north and south, and two cities on the same latitude are two different guesses.
One city per square is all a square wants. A square is filled by its first city and stays exactly as filled afterwards. Tokyo and Yokohama are the same square at every difficulty, so the second of them is worth nothing on the map.
Squares near the poles are smaller pieces of ground. A degree of longitude is a fraction of the distance near the Arctic that it is at the equator, so northern cities that feel close together often sit in different squares, while two cities the same distance apart in the tropics share one. Scandinavia, northern Russia and Canada pay out more squares per city than anywhere else.
Empty squares are shaded out. Most of the grid is ocean, desert, ice or mountain with no city in the list anywhere inside it, and those squares are greyed from the start and left out of the percentage. The clear squares are the ones some city can fill, so the map is telling you where the reachable work is before you type anything.
Two counters that reward opposite things. Cities covered counts every city in the list that sits in a square you have filled, so it leaps when you name somewhere in a dense region. Area covered is the game. Naming a fourth city in the Ruhr moves the first counter and not the second.
Difficulty sets how big a square is. Easy uses large squares, so there are fewer of them and each is easy to reach; hard cuts them down, which multiplies the number of squares to fill and splits apart cities that used to share one. Amsterdam and Groningen are one square on easy and two once the grid tightens.
The run is saved in your browser. Come back later and the cities you have named are still there, behind the Resume button above. Starting a new game clears them, which is also how you change difficulty.
The list holds cities of a hundred thousand people or more, and they are not spread evenly: a good share of the world's squares hold exactly one candidate city, and a small number of squares hold hundreds. A guess is worth making in inverse proportion to how famous the city is.
The way a run stalls is always the same: naming the cities that come to mind
first. Capitals and megacities cluster, and by the middle of a run each one is a
big jump in the cities counter and nothing on the map. The other stall is a
spelling the list does not carry. Accents and capitals are ignored, so
sao paulo finds São Paulo, but a genuinely different name in another language
needs the input language switched from the menu on the play screen.
Start with cities that have nothing near them, then sweep the wide countries.
Only after that is Europe worth typing into, and by then most of the western half of it will already be green from a handful of names.
A map filling game. The world is divided into a grid of squares, and naming any city inside a square fills that square in. The aim is to fill as much of the grid as you can. There are no rounds, no timer and no wrong answers, only the choice of which city to name next.
City Cover only cares about latitude: a city covers a band running the full width of the map, so where it sits east to west makes no difference. City Blocks cares about both directions, so two cities at the same latitude fill two different squares. City Cover rewards knowing the extremes of the map, City Blocks rewards knowing the empty middles of continents.
Cities of a hundred thousand people or more, taken from the GeoNames database. Smaller towns are not in the list, which is why the far north of Canada and the far south of Argentina stay shaded however hard you try. Accents and capital letters are ignored when matching.
Because the city landed in a square you had already filled. A square is complete as soon as one city in it is named, so a second city in the same region adds to the cities counter and nothing to the map. Tokyo and Yokohama share a square at every difficulty, and on the easier settings so do most cities within a few hundred kilometres of each other.
Because no city in the list falls inside them. Oceans, deserts, ice and high mountains take up most of the grid, and those squares are shaded from the start and excluded from the percentage. Only the squares that some city can fill are counted, so covering the map completely is possible on every difficulty.
Yes. Easy uses large squares, so there are fewer of them and each one is reached by more cities. Harder settings cut the grid finer, which both multiplies the squares to fill and splits apart cities that shared one on easy. The same opening that fills the map on easy leaves it looking sparse on hard.
Yes, in your browser. The cities you have named survive closing the tab, and the Resume button on the game page picks the run back up. Starting a new game clears them, which is also how you switch difficulty. Nothing is stored on a server and there is no account to make.
City Cover is the same box and the same city list read only by latitude, and the two games teach different halves of the world map. If you would rather be asked a question than set your own, the map trainers do the asking.
