Pick mode and level
Five game modes, four difficulty levels. Every tour is exactly five rounds, and no location repeats within a tour.
About the project
A geography game from Cologne, for Cologne.
What is GeoGuess-Cologne?
GeoGuess-Cologne combines playful local knowledge with official open data. Every round comes from Cologne’s real street network and is spatially assigned to a neighborhood and borough.
Where does the data come from?
Neighborhoods, boroughs, the city boundary, and streets come from the City of Cologne geoportal. OpenStreetMap adds road classifications. Mapillary can provide street-level imagery; without it, the game remains fully playable as an anonymized map quiz.
Privacy
There are no accounts, tracking, or analytics cookies. Highscores stay exclusively in your browser’s local storage. External map tiles load only when you open an interactive map.
Open data
Sources and licenses are documented transparently in the project documentation. Maps include the required attribution.
How to play
Through Cologne in four steps.
Read the scene
You get a street-level image from Mapillary or — when none is available — an anonymized map section built from real street geometries. Drag to look around in 360-degree images.
Place your guess
Drop your pin on the map or pick one of the four answer options. Until you confirm, you can move or change your guess as often as you like.
Read the result
The result map shows your guess next to the solution, along with the straight-line distance, street name, neighborhood, and borough. The final score follows after round five.
The five modes
From a free map pin to the pro guess.
Map
You place a pin on the map of Cologne. Points depend on the straight-line distance to the real position — every meter counts.
Which neighborhood?
Four neighborhoods to choose from. The wrong answers are drawn preferentially from the same borough, so they sit deliberately close together.
Which street?
Four street names, one of them correct. Distractors come from the neighborhood first, then the borough, and only then from the rest of Cologne.
Which borough?
Four of Cologne's nine boroughs are offered — the gentlest entry point, with the largest area behind each answer.
Pro
A free map guess with no answer options at all, scored exactly like Map mode. The victory lap for anyone who carries all of Cologne in their head.
Scoring
5,000 per round, 25,000 per tour.
In the map modes the straight-line distance decides. Up to 50 meters you get the full score; beyond that the curve falls off exponentially. A guess counts as a hit when it lands within 100 meters.
| Distance | Points |
|---|---|
| ≤ 50 m | 5,000 |
| 500 m | 4,400 |
| 1 km | 3,800 |
| 3 km | 2,150 |
| 10 km | 290 |
Choice modes
Neighborhood, street, and borough are scored all-or-nothing: a correct answer is 5,000 points, a wrong one is 0.
Outside Cologne
If your map guess falls outside the Cologne city boundary, the round scores nothing at all — regardless of the distance.
Difficulty
Four levels, four street catalogs.
The difficulty level controls which part of the catalog the five locations are drawn from. Distances are measured from the cathedral.
Easy
Larger main and connecting roads within roughly 9 kilometers of the cathedral.
Medium
Adds residential and unclassified streets out to roughly 14 kilometers from the center.
Hard
Residential, living, and service streets, stretches shorter than 700 meters, and everything beyond roughly 10 kilometers.
Expert
The complete catalog with no filter at all — every verified street in the city can come up.
Strategy
What to look for.
Road profile
Width, medians, tram tracks, and bike lanes quickly tell you whether you are on a main axis or in a quiet residential neighborhood.
Building fabric
Closed blocks of old apartment buildings point to the districts inside the ring roads; looser rows and single-family houses point to the outer boroughs.
Green and water
Avenue trees, allotment gardens, and field edges suggest the city's edge. The Rhine, the green belts, and rail embankments are the most reliable anchors.
When unsure, go central
Because points decay exponentially, an uncertain guess is worth more in the middle of the area you suspect than at its edge.