How to play MapTap
MapTap is a daily geography game on a rotatable 3D globe. You do not type names. You place a pin.
The daily loop
Each UTC day publishes 5 locations. A clue sits above the globe. Many clues point at an event that fell on this calendar date: a treaty, a launch, a battle, a stadium final. Some clues are pure geography, such as a waterfall or a canal opening. Your job is to rotate Earth until the right ocean is facing you, zoom until coastlines are readable, then tap.
Drag rotates. Scroll or pinch zooms. A tap without a drag plants an orange pending pin. Confirm tap locks the round. The board then draws a line to the true point, prints distance, and adds the round score. Next location repeats until five pins are in.
Distance math
Distance is the great-circle length between your tap and the target, using the haversine formula and a mean Earth radius of 6,371 km. That radius is the usual geodesy figure, not a polar radius and not an equatorial radius. A tap 10 km off a city centre is a near miss. A tap on the wrong continent is thousands of kilometres.
Raw closeness is an exponential: exp(-(distance / 16,250) × 3.5), scaled to 100 at zero kilometres. Beyond about 16,750 km the round is zero. That curve is steep near the target and flat far away, so city-level precision matters more than guessing the right hemisphere with a lucky ocean tap.
Country and continent floors
After distance is converted to points, two floors can raise a weak pin. If Natural Earth country polygons say your tap and the target share a country, the round cannot fall below 25. If they share a continent, the round cannot fall below 10. Country beats continent when both apply. Ocean taps have no country, so they receive neither floor.
Polygons are the 1:110 million land set. Small islands and disputed borders can disagree with a political map you memorised. The floor is a scoring rule, not a legal claim. Flag mode uses the same polygons: a tap inside the country counts as a country hit even when it is far from the centroid used as the target point.
Weights and the 1,000 cap
Daily rounds are multiplied by 1, 1, 2, 3, and 3. Five 100-point rounds therefore total 1000. Early locations are cheaper to miss. Locations four and five decide most leaderboard gaps. Practice and unlimited show the same per-round points but do not force the 1,000 wrap unless you are on a daily or archive puzzle.
Modes
Daily is one pack per UTC date, numbered from 22 June 2024. Practice is a free five-pack that does not overwrite the daily. Unlimited deals a longer deck. Archive stores 90 previous puzzle numbers. Sports swaps history for venues. Find the flag shows a flag emoji as the clue.
Tactics that actually move the score
Place the continent first. A wrong ocean is a zero. Then aim for the country so the 25-point floor is in play. Only then zoom for the city. If the clue names a capital, sit on the urban core, not the national centroid. If the clue names a battle or a stadium, the pin is a point, not a country blob.
History clues are geographic. “Independence Day” for a country still has a city: Accra, Delhi, Dhaka, Philadelphia. Read the last noun in the sentence. Launch sites are not capital cities. Baikonur is in Kazakhstan. Kennedy Space Center is on the Florida east coast, not Houston, even though mission control sat in Texas.
For islands, zoom until you see the specific island, not the archipelago label in your head. Pearl Harbor is Oahu. Krakatoa is the Sunda Strait. Saint Helena is in the South Atlantic, not the English Channel. Antarctica is a legal tap; the South Pole is a point at -90 latitude.
Sharing
Copy score writes the puzzle number, the five round scores, and the total. It does not include coordinates, so you can post a result without spoiling answers todayfor someone still playing. Miles versus kilometres does not change the copied integers.
Devices
The globe needs WebGL. Installable shortcuts are documented on the MapTap app page and the Android page. Imagery is NASA Blue Marble. Country shapes are Natural Earth via world-atlas 110m. Neither source requires an account.