A Cool Interface: City Guesser
I have many cool interfaces and websites bookmarked for a myriad of reasons — they might be aesthetically pleasing, or have a feel to them that I really enjoyed and wanted to remember to inspire me for future work. But it’s the websites that truly are unlike anything else that I’m always drawn to, those that reinvent an experience or make something new I haven’t seen before. Today I’ll be taking a look at one of my favorites: City Guesser (https://virtualvacation.us/guess).
I tend to bookmark lots of fun internet websites or games that I can play virtually with friends — City Guesser is an expansion upon the popular GeoGuessr concept. After GeoGuessr went paid almost a year ago and changed its play-style, I needed a new, free, interesting location guessing game that I could play alone or share with friends. City Guesser filled that gap with an even more intriguing concept. You choose your location (worldwide, USA, Europe, Monuments, or individuals countries) and the website sends you to a hidden location. Using high-quality video taken by tourists or natives, you can virtually “explore” the place you’ve been sent and try to figure out where you are.
Here’s a clip from one of my favorites — I’ve only managed to be sent to Portland twice, but I love the atmosphere as the person filming explores the city while it rains.
Once you’ve figured out where you are, you can hit the “start guessing” button to be taken to the guessing screen.
Then, it’s up to you to either ballpark your guess by selecting the city from far away (or selecting a city at random), or try to find your exact location on the map.
Once you’ve locked in your guess and found how right (or how wrong) you are, you can either head home to change your location or hit “next” to be sent to the next location the website decides to place you in.
While I truly enjoy how fun and calm this game is, I find it equally calming to simply let the video play and watch the unnamed person filming explore the city. Especially during the pandemic, it can be a great escape from simply sitting at home as I’ve been stuck doing. I also very much prefer this website to GeoGuessr, which uses a Google Maps-style approach to exploration. To figure out where you are, you click the arrows and “zoom” along in hops, jumping from stationary shot to stationary shot. It’s fun, if a bit jarring.
However, City Guesser works even better as a multiplayer game than GeoGuessr does, allowing up to 30 players to race against the clock to figure out where they are the fastest — awarding points based on correct or closest guesses. (It’s also free, which GeoGuessr no longer is.) As a single-player game, it’s also a really lovely immersive experience. The way I and my friends have played it before is by screen-sharing a city via Discord and working together to guess where we are, leaning into the calmer feel of single-player.
To answer the question “why doesn’t everyone use this,” this game is more of a niche thing. Not everyone is into online gaming, specifically free web-based games to play with friends. However, the clean interface and concept of exploring a city virtually is something I think many people might be interested in, given the option to try it. Even without looking into the multiplayer aspect, this game (or experience) is truly something to enjoy being immersed in.
