Fifty-six cities from orbit

Each question is a satellite image of a city with no labels, and four names to choose from. The 12 Easy cities have water you cannot mistake: Venice’s lagoon, Manhattan between its two rivers, Sydney Harbour, the Nile through Cairo, the Golden Gate, the Bosphorus and the Palm in Dubai. Medium adds 14 cities including London, Chicago, Mumbai and Buenos Aires, Hard 15 including Tokyo, Beijing, Seoul and Mexico City, and Extreme 15 more where the clue is subtler: the planned geometry of Brasília and Canberra, Manaus where the Rio Negro meets the Amazon, La Paz in its canyon, Reykjavík, Baku and Astana.

What to look for

Rivers and coasts come first: the Seine’s wide S through Paris, the Thames’s loops, the Danube splitting Budapest. Then the street plan. Barcelona’s Eixample is a grid of chamfered blocks, Washington’s avenues cut diagonally across its grid, and planned capitals such as Brasília and Canberra show up as geometric figures laid on open ground. Parks are a third clue: Central Park is a green rectangle in the middle of Manhattan. Every question has a free hint describing exactly this kind of feature, and the answer is placed on a map once you have it.

Every level asks each of its cities once, ten a round, with misses returning at the end. The imagery is Sentinel-2 cloudless by EOX, built from Copernicus Sentinel data and released under CC BY 4.0. A US-only version of the quiz covers American cities from New Orleans to Boise.