Geogessr drops you into a random street panorama somewhere in the world. Every label is hidden: no street name, no city, no country. Your job is to work out where you are from what you can see, and drop a pin on the map.
A direct hit is worth 5000 points, and the score falls off exponentially with distance: being 200 km out still leaves about 4500 points, 1000 km leaves about 3000, and 5000 km leaves about 400. A five-round game is worth up to 25,000.
The score is calculated on the server, not in the browser. The server picks the five locations when a game starts, remembers them, and measures the distances itself at the end — a result cannot be forged from the console.
Once a day a single set of five locations is generated, identical for every player on the planet. The challenge number is derived from universal time, so it rolls over for everyone at the same moment. You get one attempt, and the result goes on a shared daily leaderboard.
A duel is a two-player game over the same five locations. One player creates a room and gets a four-character code; the other joins with the code or a link. Both then play at their own pace and watch the opponent's score in the header, and the final screen shows who won. Duel points are calculated on the server too, so neither player can peek at the locations or adjust their result.
If playing at the same time is awkward, there are challenge links: after any game you can copy a link that gives a friend exactly the same five locations, with your score as the target.
You can buy a hint at any point in a round. The continent costs 250 points and the country costs 1000; the server deducts the price, and a round never goes negative because of it. The point is the choice: take the hint and bank something modest, or gamble on a full-score guess.
Fifteen ways to play: classic worldwide, one-on-one duels, a thirty-second blitz, hardcore with no panning or zooming, a last-stand mode with a rising points bar, a five-minute marathon, guessing the year a panorama was shot, individual continents, dense city centres, highways and outskirts, an endless country-guessing streak, and flash mode, where the panorama is visible for five seconds and the rest is memory.
There is none at all. Progress and records live in your browser under an anonymous id. You can add a name at the end of a game, purely to label your row on the leaderboard.