Where? gives you five animals a day and one empty world map. You drop a pin where each one lives, and that’s it. It belongs to the same family as GeoGuessr and Timeguessr, except the thing you’re hunting is a koala, and I’ve played it every day since I found it.
How a round works
Five rounds a day, the same five for everyone. Each round gives you a white silhouette with a name under it, and an empty world map. You drag the map under a fixed crosshair and press Drop pin. Then the game shows you where the animal really lives.
Land inside the range and you’re in. Miss it and the game tells you how many kilometres you were off, and your day adds up to one number: total distance off across five pins. Pin a reindeer in the open sea and it points out, politely, that reindeer aren’t that good at swimming. You get one hint a day, and a streak counter to keep you coming back. That’s the whole game.
The itch it scratches
The rhythm is the one you know from Worldle or GeoGuessr: one guess on one map, then wait for tomorrow. What changes is what you’re guessing. GeoGuessr has you reading road signs and soil colour. Timeguessr has you dating a photograph from the cars in it. Where? asks a question you half know the answer to already. Where do reindeer live? North. Obviously north. But how far south does north go, and does it include Greenland?
Half knowing is the fun of it. Nobody has memorised the range of the green sea turtle. Everyone has a feeling about it. The game scores the feeling, and the word in the title is the rule: you only need to be roughly right.
The three animals in these screenshots are gentle ones. The rounds that get me are the animals I could describe in detail and have never once placed on a map.
The small things it gets right
There’s no account to make, and no ads or paywall to get past. Every reveal links to its source, so when a range surprises you, you can go and read why. It runs in English and German and has a dark mode. Moving the map under a fixed crosshair, rather than dragging a pin around, turns out to work much better on a phone.
The map starts over central Africa, which I have stopped falling for. Mostly.
Where? is one of a set of small daily games on roughly.is, all built on the same idea: guess by dragging instead of typing. The maker’s own example is what a rump steak cost in Britain in 1975. Others are called When? and How big?, which tells you most of what you need. There’s a daily mix that pulls five rounds from across the set, which is where the koala screenshot above comes from. I keep drifting back to Where? itself.
Should you play it?
Yes. It’s free and it takes two minutes. I’m hooked and I’m coming back daily, mostly because it keeps showing me how much geography I carry around in the form of animals. Play it at where.roughly.is.