Drill the map, not flashcards. Free, no account.
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Can you locate all 34 provinces of Vietnam?
Can you locate all 24 governorates of Tunisia?
Can you tell which part of Mexico a dialing code comes from?
Can you locate all 12 nations and regions of the United Kingdom?
City Cover is not a quiz with questions in it. It is a text box and an empty world map: every city you can name paints a horizontal band across the map at that city's latitude, and the run lasts as long as you can keep thinking of names. Nothing is timed and nothing is marked wrong, so the whole game is the choice of which city to spend the next guess on. This page explains what the bands are doing and how to spend those guesses so the map fills faster.
One box, no rounds. Type into the box on the play screen. The moment what you have typed matches a city in the list, that city is yours, a band appears and the box clears itself. A name that matches nothing simply stays in the box, so there is no penalty for a wrong guess and no reason not to try one.
Only latitude counts. A band runs the full width of the world, from one edge of the map to the other, centred on the city you named. Where the city sits east to west makes no difference at all. Quito, Nairobi, Singapore and Belém are four very different guesses on a globe and very nearly the same guess here, because all four sit within a couple of degrees of the equator. This is the single fact the game turns on, and it is the one most new players take a few runs to believe.
Bands merge. Two cities close together in latitude produce one wider band rather than two, and a city inside a band you already own adds nothing to the map at all. Naming Rotterdam after Amsterdam is a free city on the counter and zero new ground.
The map has parts nothing can reach. Some latitudes have no city large enough to be in the list: everything south of the tip of South America, and the gaps between the thinly populated far north. Those are shaded out from the start, and they are left out of the percentage, so the coverage figure is measured against what is actually reachable rather than against the whole globe. Full coverage is possible on every difficulty.
Two counters that reward opposite things. Cities found counts every city in the list that falls inside your bands, not just the ones you typed, so it jumps by dozens when you name somewhere on a crowded latitude. Area covered is the one the game is about. A guess that moves the first and not the second was a wasted guess.
Difficulty sets how tall a band is. Easy gives each city a generous band, medium a narrower one, hard little more than a sliver. Narrower bands do two things at once: you need many more cities to fill the map, and more of the map becomes unreachable, because latitudes that one wide band used to bridge now fall between two thin ones.
The run is saved in your browser. Leave the page and the cities you have named are still there when you come back, 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 most of them are crowded into the northern middle of the map, between roughly the tropics and the top of Europe. That band of the world fills itself as a by-product of naming anywhere at all. The scarce latitudes are the far north, the far south, and whatever thin gap you have left behind you.
The three ways a run stalls: naming capitals, which are clustered in the
temperate north for the same reasons the cities are; forgetting the southern
hemisphere, which is where most of the remaining grey usually is; and a spelling
the list does not have. Accents and capitals do not matter, so sao paulo finds
São Paulo, but a name that is genuinely different in another language will not
be found until you switch the input language in the menu on the play screen.
Open at the ends of the map, because those bands have almost no substitutes, and work inwards.
After that the map tells you where to go: whatever is still grey is a latitude you have not thought of yet, and the remaining work is reading the map rather than listing cities.
A map filling game. You name cities, and each city you name covers a horizontal band of the world map at that city's latitude. The aim is to cover as much of the map as you can. There are no rounds, no timer and no wrong answers, only the question of which city is worth the next guess.
Cities of a hundred thousand people or more, taken from the GeoNames database. Smaller towns are not in the list, so a name that does nothing is usually a place under the cutoff rather than a spelling mistake. Accents and capital letters are ignored when matching.
No. Only latitude does. A band runs the full width of the map, so two cities at the same distance from the equator cover the same ground however far apart they are east to west. Naming Tokyo and then Los Angeles feels like crossing an ocean and covers almost exactly the same band.
Because no city in the list can reach it. There is nothing large enough south of the tip of South America, nothing above the northern edge of Russia and Norway, and on the harder settings the narrow bands leave small gaps in between. Shaded latitudes are excluded from the percentage, so covering the map completely is possible on every difficulty.
By treating the extremes as the real game. The far north takes about four names and the far south about half a dozen, and neither will ever be covered by accident. The crowded middle of the map fills itself while you do everything else, so it is the part to leave until last.
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.
Yes. The menu on the play screen switches the input language between English, Dutch, Spanish, French and German, and the city list is reloaded with the names used in that language. It is the setting to reach for when a city you are sure about is not being recognised.
City Blocks is the same idea on a grid, where east and west count as much as north and south, and it is the natural next game once the latitudes of the world are in your head. If you would rather be tested than test yourself, the map trainers ask a question and wait for an answer.
