MapTap, an everyday geography game, is my new Wordle game

As Wordle celebrates its fifth anniversary, we have to be honest with ourselves: Are we still having fun, after thousands of Wordles? Sometimes we are, but other times, the everyday pun feels like a way to keep a chain of events going. Instead, my friends and I became addicted to a new game, MapTap, which is available as an app and online.

Each day, MapTap has five questions, each one offering you a city (or, sometimes, the location of a historical event or battle) to click on the map. You get a score between 0 and 100 for each clue, depending on how close you are.

Each question becomes progressively more difficult, so the first clue might be a major cosmopolitan 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 finish the five-question game with a score out of 1,000. (Personally, I think any score over 900 is a very good score, but some patients strive for that ideal score.)

Like Wordle, you get fun little text to copy, paste, and send in your group chats. Here is my story from today, for example:

www.maptap.gg June 18
100🎯 90🎉 97🔥 85🌟 63🤨
Final score: 828

(No, I wasn’t planning to write this article when I used MapTap today, but I’m sharing my average score to show you that it’s okay not to know things. However, I would like to state for the record that I know where Indonesia is, but it’s a really big country. I also always forget exactly which island off the coast of Italy is Sicily. I’m doing my best.)

You don’t have to be a geography expert to start playing and enjoying this game, but in all fairness, the game tends to reward the type of people in it. Either way, what makes MapTap so fun is that you really start to learn more about geography and improve your results over time.

At the end of each day’s puzzle, the game gives you a few paragraphs about each location, which is informal but informative (I particularly enjoyed a recent game that was themed around the life and travels of Ibn Battuta, a 14th-century explorer who spent most of his life traveling around Africa, Asia, and the Iberian Peninsula).

I appreciated other Wordle-like geography games like Worldle, especially Globle, but they didn’t stick with me and my friends like MapTap. Sometimes, Worldle and Global puzzles are unsolvable without looking up a world map on Google to help you – if you don’t know which countries border Turkmenistan, you won’t pull names out of thin air. But on MapTap, when you’re stuck on a directory, you can at least try it and see how close you are to it.

So, try running MapTap and share your results in the most competitive group chat. They argue about whether the site of the Battle of Midway is known to everyone. It’s fun.