The capital cities game
Capitals is MapFinder's five-round run. The game names a capital city, you get one guess on a 3D satellite globe, and the closer your pin lands the more of the 5,000 points you keep.
Free, and your first capital is one you already know.
How the difficulty ramps
A five-round run walks from easy to hard, and the card tells you which tier you are in before you guess. The tiers describe the city, never you. “One of the tricky ones” is information about the round, not a verdict on your education.
- One of the famous ones. A curated opening set: Tokyo, Buenos Aires, Nairobi, Lisbon. Recognisability is not something a single number measures, so this tier is picked by hand.
- A little less famous. The broad middle of the world, ordered by how many people live in the country. Population tracks how often a place comes up in conversation better than land area does.
- One of the tricky ones. The world’s least populous countries, where knowing the capital is a genuine flex.
The pool is 198 cities: the 193 UN member states plus Palestine, Kosovo, Taiwan, Vatican City and Bermuda. Nothing repeats until its tier runs dry, so a session keeps handing you new cities rather than recycling the same dozen.
The capitals that catch people out
Almost every capital that costs a good player points does it for one reason: the capital is not the country’s best-known city. The eye goes to the famous one, the click follows, and the round is decided before you have really thought about it. This is the list worth knowing cold.
| Country | The capital | The city people click instead |
|---|---|---|
| Turkey | Ankara | Istanbul |
| Australia | Canberra | Sydney |
| Brazil | Brasília | São Paulo |
| United States | Washington D.C. | New York |
| Canada | Ottawa | Toronto |
| Nigeria | Abuja | Lagos |
| Switzerland | Bern | Zurich |
| Morocco | Rabat | Casablanca |
| Kazakhstan | Astana | Almaty |
| Pakistan | Islamabad | Karachi |
| New Zealand | Wellington | Auckland |
| Vietnam | Hanoi | Ho Chi Minh City |
| China | Beijing | Shanghai |
| Myanmar | Naypyidaw | Yangon |
| Tanzania | Dodoma | Dar es Salaam |
| Ivory Coast | Yamoussoukro | Abidjan |
| Ecuador | Quito | Guayaquil |
| Cameroon | Yaoundé | Douala |
| Benin | Porto-Novo | Cotonou |
| Burundi | Gitega | Bujumbura |
| Belize | Belmopan | Belize City |
None of these is a disaster on the scoring curve, because the wrong city is usually in the right country. But Brasília sits 870 km from São Paulo, which is a swing of more than 2,000 points, and over a five-round run one of those is the difference between a good score and a great one.
Three of them are worth a footnote. Bolivia has two seats: Sucre is the constitutional capital and the answer here, while La Paz holds the government. South Africa splits its capital three ways between Pretoria, Cape Town and Bloemfontein. And in Ivory Coast and Benin the official capital was moved inland decades ago while the old port kept the population, the embassies and most of the attention.
Reading a capital you have never heard of
A tricky-tier round is not a memory test you have already failed. Capitals are placed for reasons, and the reasons repeat, so a city you cannot name is still a city you can reason your way toward.
- Purpose-built capitals sit in the middle. Abuja, Brasília, Astana, Naypyidaw, Yamoussoukro, Islamabad and Canberra were all put where they are to be central, neutral, or away from a coast. When a country moved its capital, guess inland.
- Everything else is a port or a river. Capitals that grew rather than got built are on the best harbour or the first navigable bend, because that is where the trade was. On an island nation, guess the largest natural bay.
- Small countries are nearly a free 5,000. A microstate is smaller than the 25 km perfect band, so a pin anywhere on the country scores full marks. Getting the country right is the whole round.
- Deserts push cities to the edges. In North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula the capital is on the coast or on the one river worth having, never in the interior.
- Mountains push them into valleys. In the Andes, the Himalaya and the East African highlands the capital sits in the one flat basin, which is often visible in the imagery before you know the name.
What you are guessing on
The globe is real satellite imagery, not a cartoon map, and place names stay hidden until your guess is locked. That means the terrain has to do the work: the snow line, the edge of the Sahara, the shape of a river delta, whether a coast faces the right ocean.
Capital coordinates cover every UN member state, baked in at build time from Natural Earth and the open mledoze/countries dataset, so a round never waits on an API and never breaks when one goes away.
After you guess, the camera flies out to frame your pin and the real city together and draws the arc between them. That flight is the part that teaches, because it shows you the relationship you got wrong rather than just the answer.
What a good run looks like
Five rounds at 5,000 apiece makes 25,000 a perfect run, which essentially nobody gets.
| Run total | What it means |
|---|---|
| Under 10,000 | Right continents, roughly. The map is still a shape rather than a place. |
| 10,000 to 15,000 | You were landing in the right countries most rounds. |
| 15,000 to 20,000 | Right countries, and finding actual cities in the easier ones. |
| Over 20,000 | Real cities, repeatedly, including at least one you reasoned out. |
| 25,000 | Five perfect rounds. Screenshot it. |
Your best round, best run and average are kept in your own browser, so there is no account to make and no scoreboard to be intimidated by.