The river, not the country

Each question names a city and its country, and you pick the river that flows through it from four options. The map flies to the city straight away, so geography can help: a city near the coast is often on an estuary, a city in the hills on a smaller river. Once you answer, the map lists the river and a line about the city and its water. The quiz has 148 cities in four levels, 32 at Easy, 35 at Medium, 39 at Hard and 42 at Extreme, and each level asks every city once, ten a round.

Options from the same country

Two of the wrong answers are always rivers of the same country, so knowing that Delhi is in India does not narrow it down: you choose between the Yamuna, the Ganges, the Godavari and the rest. Some are planted on purpose. Delhi and Agra are offered the Ganges, Munich the Danube, Frankfurt and Heidelberg the Rhine, and Bucharest the Danube too, though the city is about 60 km north of it, on the Dâmbovița. At Easy and Medium the fourth option is a famous river from anywhere in the world; at Hard and Extreme it comes from a neighbouring country.

Where two rivers run through a city, the second is never a wrong option: Lyon is on the Rhône and the Saône, Belgrade on the Danube and the Sava, Winnipeg on the Red and the Assiniboine, Wuhan on the Yangtze and the Han.

From the Seine to the Tuul

Easy is the rivers a city is known for: the Seine in Paris, the Thames in London, the Vltava in Prague, the Ganges at Varanasi, the Chao Phraya in Bangkok. Medium adds the Hooghly at Kolkata, the Huangpu in Shanghai, the Rio Negro at Manaus and the Garonne at Bordeaux. Hard goes to cities whose river few people could name, such as Ahmedabad on the Sabarmati, Isfahan on the Zayandeh and Austin on Texas’s own Colorado. Extreme is the Musi in Hyderabad, the Queiq in Aleppo, the Tuul in Ulaanbaatar and the Emajõgi in Tartu.