Whereabouts World
Somewhere in the world is today's mystery country. You have six guesses. Each one tells you how far off you are and which way to go, and unlocks a clue.
How it works
Pick what to find. Country: the world's 196 sovereign countries. Capital: their capital cities. City: today's city is one of about 560 cities of a million people or more; practice adds cities from 500,000. Town: places of 15,000 to 100,000 people. Village: places of 500 to 5,000. Region: about 1,000 states, provinces and regions in 41 countries, from California to Kerala. Each mode has its own daily answer, streak and stats, and the daily list reshuffles each time it runs out. Towns and villages are the better-known ones in each country (those with names in the most languages), capped per country so the whole world gets a turn.
After each guess you see the straight-line distance, the direction to the answer and how close you are, from 0% at 20,000 km to 100%. Every wrong guess unlocks the next clue: size, climate, money and health in its country, the oddest thing about its country, where it is, and finally its first letter. At the end you see what the country's name means. For the UK at a closer zoom, play Whereabouts UK; for country numbers head to head, Higher or Lower World.
Places, populations and capitals come from GeoNames. Climate is NASA POWER's long-term average temperature for the place. Country facts are the 67 measures in Higher or Lower World (CIA World Factbook, FAO and others via Our World in Data, UNESCO, USGS and Wikipedia). Name meanings are from my country names study (Wikipedia, CC BY-SA). Borders: Natural Earth.