How to Play

Five badges, five clicks, a score out of 1,000.

The basics

A badge appears. Click the globe wherever you reckon that team plays its home games, then hit Submit Guess. The globe flies over to the real spot, draws a line from your pin to the actual ground, and tells you how far off you were. Hit Next and you get the following one. After five you get a summary you can share.

You're guessing the ground, not the town. For most clubs that's barely a difference. For the ones whose stadium sits well outside the place they're named after, it's worth real points.

Scoring

Each question is worth 100 points before multipliers, on a curve that falls off with distance. Perfect click is 100, and it drops away smoothly from there. There's no cliff edge and no pixel-hunting — a near miss still scores well.

What that actually means: getting the continent right matters far more than being precise once you're there. Going from 5,000 km out to 1,000 km out earns you 47 points. Going from 100 km to a perfect click earns you 2. So if you're torn between two countries, sort that out first — fiddling with a pin you already know is roughly right is wasted effort.

Difficulty and multipliers

The five questions aren't equally hard, and they're not worth the same. Leagues sit in one of three difficulty tiers, and each question pulls from a specific one:

So 1,000 is the maximum, and the last two questions are worth more than the first three put together. Good rounds are almost always decided by how you handle the obscure ones, not by nailing the easy ones — everybody nails the easy ones.

The score after each guess shows the base points with the multiplier in brackets, so "90 (×3)" means 90 points that are actually worth 270.

Controls worth knowing about

• Click the badge to blow it up. Crests with small text or fiddly detail are far easier full-screen. Escape or click outside to close it again.
• Zoom in before you click. Scroll or pinch. Clicking while zoomed right out is imprecise, and on questions 4 and 5 that imprecision gets tripled.
• You can move your pin. Click again before submitting and it relocates. Nothing commits until you press the button.
• The globe stays put between questions. If two teams in a row are in the same part of the world you keep your view.

A few tactics

Read the badge, not just the name

Club crests are stuffed with geography. Anchors and ships mean a port. Mountains, rivers and local industry show up constantly in European and South American badges. Loads of them have the city name written on them outright — which is exactly why the enlarge button exists. Reading a badge for geography goes through this properly: civic heraldry, what the diacritics tell you, and the naming conventions that give away a country.

Think about how spread out the country is

Some countries are small enough that working out the nation gets you inside 200 km automatically. Others are big enough that you can know the country and still be a thousand kilometres out. In those cases it's worth asking whether the league clusters around one big city or genuinely covers the whole place.

Use the fact that hard questions are hard

Questions 4 and 5 come from the obscure tier, which in practice means lower divisions and leagues that don't get much coverage. So if a badge on question 4 means nothing to you, that's information — it's probably not one of the handful of globally famous clubs. Getting the right region for a club you don't know beats guessing a city you do.

Watch out for shared names

Loads of clubs share names across countries. There's a Córdoba in Spain and one in Argentina, and there are Nacionals, Rangers and Athletics all over the place. If a name feels familiar, check the badge's language and styling actually match the country you're about to click.

Daily rounds and streaks

Each daily mode puts out one round a day at midnight Eastern, and everyone gets the same five teams, so scores are worth comparing. Once you've played the day's round it's saved — coming back shows your summary rather than letting you have another go.

Playing on consecutive days builds a streak, which shows up on the results screen. Streaks live in your browser, so they're per-device and they'll reset if you clear site data. Miss a day and the streak starts over.

The three modes

• Daily — everything in the game across six sports. Broadest, and for most people the hardest.
• Footy Daily — soccer only, and it goes further down the pyramid since it isn't competing for slots with other sports.
• USA Daily — North American leagues, including lower-level baseball and college football. Scores more harshly because the map is smaller.