About MapFinder
MapFinder is a free map guessing game: it names a place, and you find it on a 3D satellite globe. It exists to make geography knowledge feel like play rather than a test.
Why it works this way
Most geography games are quizzes wearing a map. You are shown four options, or asked to type a name, and the map is decoration. MapFinder inverts that. The answer is a place you find on a real photographed planet, and the only input is where you put your finger.
That is also why there is no sign-up wall, no round limit and nothing to buy. A shared link should be playable in ten seconds by someone who has never heard of the game, on the phone they are already holding.
What it is built on
The globe is MapLibre GL rendering satellite imagery in a true 3D projection, with the camera work written for this game rather than inherited from a mapping widget: the opening flight, the reveal, the way pitch tracks zoom. Smoothness is treated as gameplay rather than polish.
| What you are looking at | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Satellite imagery | Esri World Imagery |
| Country shapes and borders | Natural Earth |
| Capital cities and coordinates | Natural Earth populated places |
| Country metadata and flags | The open mledoze/countries dataset, flags from flagcdn |
| Place photos and descriptions | Wikipedia and Wikidata |
| The map engine | MapLibre GL JS |
Capitals and borders are baked in at build time, so a round never waits on a third-party API and never breaks when one of them goes away. The place descriptions shown after a round are sourced rather than generated: every line traces back to a Wikidata property or a sentence of Wikipedia’s own prose, and the card carries the links so you can check it. No language model writes any of it, which means the worst failure is a stale number rather than an invented fact.
What it knows about you
Your country is detected in your own browser from the timezone your device already reports, falling back to your language settings. No IP geolocation service is called and nothing about you is sent anywhere.
Your scores, best times and records live in your browser’s own storage. There is no account, no login and no advertising; Google Analytics counts visits, and nothing else about you leaves the page. Clearing your browser data clears your records too, which is the honest trade for not having asked you to sign up.
Who made it
MapFinder is built by the developer of WorldGuessr. The two share an audience and nothing else. MapFinder is its own game, not a funnel into another one.
Where it is going
Two modes exist today: a five-round capitals run and a timed race to find every country. More rounds, daily challenges and streaks are the direction. None of them are promised dates, and none of them will arrive behind a login.