My Best GeoGuessr Plays: Version 3.0

In case it wasn’t already abundantly clear, I am a fan of GeoGuessr. 

We all know how this game works by now. They show you some imagery from Google Street View and you have to figure out where you are. In the words of Jeffrey Dean Morgan, where the “X” are you? Well, here are a handful of rounds I’ve played since the most recent time I wrote an article about this. So enjoy.

Google Street View footage (within the GeoGuessr interface) of a restaurant called “Amore Ristorante & Pizzeria” in a northern European setting.

I first need to mention that I’ve taken to playing No Move instead of Moving. I honestly prefer this mode, as it’s fairer when both players have the same information with which to make their guess. That is, if they choose to analyze everything at their disposal before sending their plonk.

In any case, as you can tell from the image, the game’s RNG put me right in front of a pizza restaurant. Pizza is, of course, the most famous dish in the world - it needs no introduction. It’s often associated with Italy, but the building’s architecture appeared far more austere and utilitarian than what you’d likely find in Italy. It’s the sort of building you’d feel belongs in a colder climate. Additionally, the coverage just looked “colder”, possibly because the locals were wearing thick jackets.

I might not have been able to move down the street, but I could still pan the camera around to see some other buildings. And that’s when I felt certain I was not in Italy.

Google Street View footage, within the GeoGuessr interface, of a town with Scandinavian architecture and a small mountain in the distance. It looks like late autumn.

The text on the signs not affiliated with the pizzeria bore a language that seemed Scandinavian to me. This stood in stark contrast to Italian, in which the great majority of words end in a vowel. And yes, Italy has mountains as well, but that red house-like building in the corner isn’t what you’d see in an Italian villa.

So I had a decision to make. The architecture made me inclined to send Norway, coupled with the nearby mountains - Denmark, Sweden, and Finland are much flatter countries on average. Because there was a pizzeria, and I tend to think of pizza as a dish served mostly to tourists rather than locals, I decided to go with Alesund. This city, located on Norway’s west coast, is a popular tourist destination near some of the country’s most well-known fjords.

As it turned out, the precise location was in the town of Stjørdal, closer to the Swedish border than I would have liked. However, it ended up mattering little, because my opponent did in fact guess Italy! They must’ve let the pizzeria get to them.

Google Street View footage of northern Israel within the GeoGuessr interface. A small purple truck can be seen advertising cannabis products.

This one was just plain silly.

I was playing Moving, and the setting was pretty dry, with the trees to match such a climate. My first thought, upon seeing those trees, was that I was near the Mediterranean Sea. I had one specific country in mind, and it was confirmed when I saw the purple truck.

One of the most important skills any GeoGuessr player must acquire is the ability to recognize languages. You need not know what the words mean all of the time, but it’s imperative to be able to tell Dutch from Turkish, for example. If not for this game, I probably wouldn’t know that Romanian was a close relative of Italian!

In any case, when I saw the characters that resembled musical notes, I knew I was looking at Hebrew script. I’ve seen plenty of dreidels with such letters on them, though I couldn’t tell you what each symbol is called. Again, you just need to know that it’s Hebrew, not what it’s telling you in Hebrew.

There is only one country where Hebrew is an official language. Only one: The State of Israel.

Now, given what country I’m talking about, I want to make one thing perfectly clear: I am no fan of Benjamin Netanyahu. He’s a genocidal maniac. As far as GeoGuessr goes, however, I am politically neutral with regards to the Israel-Palestine conflict. I only concern myself with it when it relates to practical in-game knowledge. 

More importantly for this blog, the truck is hilarious. Maybe only one country uses the Hebrew script to write, but we all know what that leaf means when it’s on a corporate logo. That’s right: This is a weed truck.

I just…that’s too funny. Israel is a country that’s despised by many progressives in the United States and elsewhere, and for good reason. Meanwhile, cannabis has been decriminalized mostly in relatively progressive nations like the Netherlands, and movements in the United States to make it more accessible for medical and recreational use are associated with progressive ideals. However you might feel about the drug laws in the United States, the Netherlands, Israel, or anywhere else, this juxtaposition made me laugh to no small degree.

Google Street View footage (within the GeoGuessr interface) of a mountainous town in northeastern Turkey.

I played this round earlier today (as of when I wrote this article). Based on how low both of our health bars were at this point, and that the multiplier was at 3x, I felt confident that this round was what they call sudden death.

As soon as I saw the sign on top of a nearby hotel building, I knew with absolute certainty what language it was in. The Turkish language has a very unique look, with its squiggly lines and other symbols. Additionally, I saw a Turkish flag near that same hotel building.

If you know the area code patterns in Turkey, it’s fairly easy to region-guess the country. All you need to remember is that “2” area codes go in roughly the westernmost quarter of the country, “3” area codes are in the next third of Turkey, and area codes starting in “4” are assigned to the rest of Turkey, from the middle of the country all the way to the borders with Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Iran. That is your “Turkish Delight” as opposed to your “American Bad Dream”. 

However, there’s a catch. If you’re in Turkey and see a phone number starting with “5”, then that phone number is useless, because the “5” area codes aren’t tied to a specific location. I found a “508” number that would belong to Türk Telekom, the state-owned telecommunications company, so I knew that wasn’t going to help me.

Of course, my general rule of thumb for Turkey is that the more moist and mountainous the landscape is, the more likely you are to be toward the west of the country. This place looked like it might be a ski resort during the winter - the hotels would make sense in that case. But before I plonked in the southwest of the country, it occurred to me that northeastern Turkey is also quite mountainous. Therefore, I decided to guess there.

Well, considering that my opponent sent Romania, I took home the Elo points for that round. There’s something viscerally satisfying about spotting a clue the other player misses, and I got to revel in it today. This is why I keep coming back to GeoGuessr, even though I became quite frustrated at first upon being promoted to Master II. (I expect to be demoted pretty soon, just because these players are making mincemeat of me, but that’s another story).

Thank you for reading, and keep an eye out for my next GeoGuessr article.