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Can you match every Canadian area code to its province?
Can you locate all 12 regions of Morocco?
Can you locate all 16 regions of Ghana?
Can you tell which part of Mexico a dialing code comes from?
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South Africa paints phone numbers on everything: shopfronts, bakkies, boundary walls, farm gates and for-sale boards. The first three digits of a landline number are an area code, and an area code is a place. Better still, the code is blocked by region, so the second digit alone tells you which corner of the country you are in before you have read the third. This page is the whole plan, and the game drills it.
A South African landline number is ten digits written out in full, and it always
carries its leading zero: 021 123 4567. The first three digits are the area
code, the remaining seven are the subscriber number. In international form the
zero is dropped and the country code takes its place, so the same number becomes
+27 21 123 4567, which is what you see on anything aimed at tourists.
The zero is not part of the code itself, it is the trunk prefix, but South Africa has dialled it on every call since 2007, local ones included. That is why signs print it and why it is worth reading the code as the three characters you actually see rather than the two underneath.
01 through 05,
and that pair is the region. This is the piece worth learning first, because
it is nearly free and it is right far more often than a guess at the map.06, 07 or 08. Those are mobile and non-geographic
ranges, and they tell you nothing about location. A number beginning 08 in
particular is a toll-free, share-call or voice-over-IP line that a national
chain will print on a sign in every province.The blocks run roughly like this: 01x across the interior north, from the Gauteng cities out to Limpopo, Mpumalanga and the North West; 02x through the Western Cape and up the dry Atlantic coast; 03x across KwaZulu-Natal; 04x through the Eastern Cape and westwards along the Garden Route; and 05x over the Free State and the Northern Cape. The map in the game is coloured the same way, so the five blocks are visible while you play.
Two failure modes are worth knowing. The blocks follow the old telephone regions rather than today's provinces, so a code can sit in a province its block does not suggest, and the boundaries between codes run along exchange catchments rather than along anything drawn on a map. Both of those are why the game is worth playing rather than reasoning out from a provincial map.
Each block can be played on its own from the game's start dialog, which is the sane way in: one block at a time, until the second digit is automatic and the third is recognition.
Cape Town and the winelands around it. Together with Johannesburg and Durban this is one of the three codes that turn up far more often than their share of the map, because that is where the shopfronts are. Learning the three metropolitan codes first is most of the value in the whole plan.
The Garden Route, around George and Knysna. It sits in the Western Cape, so a reading based on province would put it in the 02x block, and it is in 04x instead: the numbering follows the old telephone regions along the coast rather than the provincial line. This is the code most likely to catch you out once the block pattern feels solid.
Kimberley, and with it most of the Northern Cape and the western edge of the North West. It covers more ground than any other code in the plan and almost none of the population, which makes it a good default guess when a number turns up somewhere empty and flat.
Ten as it is written and dialled inside the country: a three digit area code beginning with zero, then a seven digit subscriber number. Internationally the leading zero is dropped and replaced by the country code 27, which makes it eleven digits including the plus.
Yes. Ten digit dialling became compulsory in 2007, so the area code is used even when calling a number in the same town. That is the reason the full code appears on almost every printed or painted number in the country.
By the first two digits. Landline area codes start 01 through 05 and identify a place. Mobile numbers start 06, 07 or 08, and the 08 range also holds toll-free, share-call and voice-over-IP numbers. None of those tell you where anything is.
An overlay code, brought in when the Gauteng numbers began running short. It shares ground with a code that was already there rather than covering any of its own, so this game leaves it out for the same reason it leaves out the mobile ranges: there would be no separate region to click.
Close enough to be useful, but not exactly. The blocks were drawn around telephone regions that predate the current provinces, so most codes sit tidily inside one province while a few straddle a border or land in a neighbouring one. The Garden Route codes are the well known example: Western Cape ground on an Eastern Cape block.
Painted on shopfronts and workshop walls, on the doors of bakkies and delivery vans, on estate agent boards and on the farm signs at gate entrances. Rural signage carries them as often as city signage does, which makes this one of the few readable clues that works in the empty parts of the country.
If this is your meta, the Brazil, Mexico and Spain codes are built the same way, and Poland is the other plan whose leading digits sweep across the country in blocks.