A dot on a map with no borders

A single dot marks a city on a map that shows coastlines and nothing else: no borders, no labels, no rivers. Pick the city from four options, all of them real cities nearby, so you are choosing between Lyon and Geneva rather than Lyon and Lima. Ten questions make a round.

The level sets how much map you get. Easy shows about 4,800 km of map across, Medium 3,400 km and Hard 2,400 km, so on Hard an inland dot may have no coast in view at all. The wrong options are also kept at least 600 km, 400 km or 280 km away from the dot, so the question never turns on a few pixels: Kyoto is never offered against Osaka.

Capitals or famous cities

Capitals mode uses 150 national capitals, 50 at each level, following the country’s own difficulty; the microstates and remote islands are left out, since a dot on a speck of Pacific is no clue. Cities mode is a separate list of 100 well-known non-capital cities: 17 at Easy, from New York and Rio de Janeiro to Dubai and Sydney; 39 at Medium; and 44 at Hard, such as Porto, Kraków, Dubrovnik, Chennai, Kyoto and Almaty. Mixed draws from the whole list at each city’s own zoom.