My Best GeoGuessr Plays: Version 1.0

In case you didn’t know, I play a lot of GeoGuessr. It’s my favorite game. And again, if you weren’t aware of how the game works, it’s pretty simple. You’re given imagery from Google Street View and you have to guess where you are. 

There are many clues one uses to play the game. The most obvious one is to pay attention to which side of the road cars are driving on - roughly 70% of the world’s countries and people drive on the right, but knowing which countries drive on the left can really narrow down your guess. Another big one is to look for signage - if you can tell languages apart when you come across a directional sign, that goes a long way to guessing the country or sometimes region.

In today’s blog post, I’m going to be showcasing a few of the most notable rounds I’ve played in which I either recognized a location with insane accuracy or learned a valuable lesson. Here we go.

Google Street View imagery of rural eastern Colorado, USA with the GeoGuessr interface.

In this round I played roughly two months ago, I spawned in a decently arid region. I could tell based on the sprawl that I was in the United States - I believe I saw a “SPEED LIMIT” sign at one point, which is important because Canada’s speed signs say “MAXIMUM” instead. 

The landscape brought to mind the High Plains, and the grain elevators resembled those frequently seen in America’s agricultural regions. Of course, it’s mostly factory farms these days rather than family-owned ones, but that’s beside the point. Very often, the USA is a difficult country to region-guess because so much of it looks the same.

That was not the case here once I saw a sign for “Kit Carson”. Based on my extensive time spent studying county maps of the United States for fun, I happened to know that there is a Kit Carson County in eastern Colorado. I placed my marker there, an act colloquially referred to as “plonking”, and hoped I would get lucky. As it turned out, I did get lucky, because I won the round and, if I remember correctly, the game.

Google Street View imagery of Dublin, Ireland within the GeoGuessr interface.

This one was wild.

As soon as I spawned, I saw that the city looked decently familiar. In fact, it was almost too familiar. Exploring the neighborhood on Street View, I noticed the facade of a building called the “Liffey Trust Centre”, and that’s when I knew the city. There is only one River Liffey.

As soon as I figured out where I was, I audibly exclaimed “Holy hell!” because I had literally flown back home from Dublin the previous day. I’m not kidding. I had walked these streets a mere two days before, including an area of Dublin’s Docklands section. While I did not see the Liffey Trust Centre, which Google Maps tells me is an apartment complex, I was a mere 100 meters away from it at most. 

In all probability, this was just an insane coincidence. Perhaps the game has some way of knowing where my computer has been, but that almost seems doubtful given that my IP address varies depending on what Wi-Fi network I connect to. It is possible that Big GeoGuessr, much like Orwell’s Big Brother, is always watching me no matter where I am. The algorithms know who you are, and that’s not a conspiracy theory - that’s public information. Still, it was pretty insane seeing Dublin on my interface so soon after returning from a trip to that very city, especially considering that urban rounds become a lot less frequent in duels the higher you climb in the rankings.

Google Street View imagery of Burgas, Bulgaria with the GeoGuessr interface.

Here is possibly my most impressive guess to date.

As stated at the start of this post, a truly informed play in GeoGuessr must involve looking at several clues. It’s not always enough to see an Internet domain or national flag. In this case, I saw neither.

The first thing I noticed was a series of austere high-rise apartment buildings that are informally referred to as “commie blocks.” This told me I was likely in Eastern Europe or Central Asia, a hunch that was further confirmed when I saw signs in the Cyrillic alphabet that’s used in languages such as Russian. 

However, the roads were a lot better maintained than what I’d expect in Russia or especially Ukraine. While I’m not great at telling when the street-view imagery was taken, that would have been another clue. For obvious reasons, Google Street View hasn’t updated its coverage of Ukraine or Russia for several years.

My final clue was the vegetation. The trees reminded me of the time I visited Greece some years ago, evoking Southern Europe and the Mediterranean Sea. However, the specific type of apartment buildings I saw made me believe I was in a formerly communist country. And the height of said buildings implied a city of some size. 

I guessed Burgas, which is the fourth-largest city in Bulgaria and a semi-popular tourist destination on the Black Sea coast. As it turns out, I ended up plonking less than a mile from the flag, being rewarded with 4,997 points out of a possible 5,000. I can’t even tell you how satisfying that was - that would be the highest single-round score I’ve ever achieved in a duel if not for…

Google Street View imagery of Nuuk, Greenland with the GeoGuessr interface. 

I’d seen images of Nuuk, the only settlement in Greenland that can honestly be called a “city”, and the apartment buildings somewhat resembled motels. The flag painted on what might be a bus stop also jumped out at me - I’ve seen a few people fly the Greenlandic flag in protest against Trump’s threatened annexation of the world’s largest island. (Which, to be perfectly clear, I denounce this one hundred percent.)

As you can see in the image above, an indigenous woman is painted on the side of the apartment complex, and I knew from prior knowledge that most of the Greenlandic population is indigenous. The vegetation (mostly lack thereof) also reminded me of the Arctic.

After that, it was just a matter of locating Nuuk on the map. I felt confident it was Nuuk because nowhere else in Greenland could possibly be that densely populated. As such, I was rewarded with 4,998 points, two shy of the maximum, and felt quite proud of myself.

Overall, GeoGuessr has been an immense asset to my fascination with geography. Sometimes, when you feed a hyperfixation too much, it spins out of control - that’s definitely the case here. 

Thank you for reading.