About DailyGeo

What the game is

Every day at local midnight, one mystery world capital and one mystery country are published, the same two for everyone playing on that calendar day. You type any capital or country you can think of and the guess comes back as a row of clues rather than a yes or a no. In Capitals mode a guess is scored on 5 clues: currency, official language, distance as the crow flies, compass bearing and population. In Countries mode there are 7, adding the dominant flag colours and the number of land borders. Green means exact, orange means close, red means far.

Guesses are unlimited, but the fewer you need the more points you score, so the game is played by reasoning rather than by sweeping the map: a shared currency narrows a region, a bearing and a distance draw an arc, and language and borders finish the job. The result shares as a colour-coded grid, and the win screen ends with a short note about the place you found. There is no account, no sign-up and no download.

What else is on the site

GeoMemory is a recall drill rather than a guessing game: you type every country, or every world capital, that you can remember while a blank world map fills in around you. There are 14 challenges in each language, world scope and one per continent, and the world ones ask for 197 answers. It times the run, scores a completion percentage and tolerates typos and missing accents.

Winning a daily puzzle also drops a card pack, and the 790 cards in the collection are the countries, capitals and major cities the game plays on. Cards are earned by playing, never bought: nothing on this site is for sale to a player.

The Atlas is the written layer: 182 articles in English, and the same set in French, Spanish and German, on geography games, capitals, countries and how to actually learn them. Every figure in an article comes from the same datasets the game plays on, and the sources are named on the page.

Who makes it

Eliott Gandiolle, an independent developer in Paris, France. I build a small family of free daily games (DailyGeo, GeoMemory, Geopolitix, DailyMetro) in my own time. I write the code, assemble the datasets, draw the pixel art and write the Atlas articles. The formal publisher details, as French law requires them, are on the legal notice.

I am not a geographer, a cartographer or a statistician, and this site is not a research output. It is a game built carefully on other people's published data, which is why the sourcing below matters more than my opinion does.

Where the data comes from

The board plays on 172 capitals and 172 countries. That roster, with each place's country, continent, coordinates and population, is maintained in this repository; the pipeline that builds the capital pages joins it on ISO 3166 codes to Wikidata (codes, the French, Spanish and German names, and a Wikipedia article per language) and to the World Bank (country-level figures). The extra cities in the card collection come from the GeoNames cities15000 dump, filtered to metropolitan areas above a million people. Land-border counts derive from the mledoze/countries dataset (the data behind REST Countries), sanitised so a count matches what a reader would call a neighbouring country.

The capital pages in the Atlas add elevation and time zone read from the Copernicus digital elevation model through Open-Meteo, climate normals computed from ten full years of ERA5 daily means, country-level economic figures from the World Bank, the Big Mac index from The Economist where it is published, and an authoritative Wikipedia link per capital in each language.

Currencies, official languages and flag colours are curated in this repository rather than lifted from one feed, because each is a judgement call the clue table has to be consistent about: the language clue uses nationwide de jure status and drops regional status, and the flag clue uses the principal colours rather than every tint in an emblem. Both rules are written out in the source next to the data.

How the daily puzzle is generated

The answer is derived from the calendar date alone. There is no clock, no server and no randomness at play time: the date is hashed against the pool, so every player in the world gets the same two answers on the same day and a score is actually comparable. The reset is your own local midnight, so a player far enough east can be a day ahead for a few hours, which is the accepted price of not rolling the world over on Paris time.

8 small island states are barred from ever being the daily answer while staying fully guessable and fully scored. A daily puzzle that lands on an obscure island is not a hard puzzle, it is an unfair one, but a player who wants to name one should still be able to.

What this site does not claim

DailyGeo is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to the World Bank, GeoNames, Wikidata, the Wikimedia Foundation, Open-Meteo, Copernicus or The Economist. Their data is used under its own terms and credited on the pages that use it.

A clue is only as good as the dataset behind it. Population figures come from different census years in different countries and are rounded for display. Official-language and flag-colour sets are a defensible reading, not the only possible one. Distances are great-circle distances between two representative points, not travel distances. Nothing here is a statement about a border dispute or the status of a territory: the list of playable countries is a game roster, chosen so the puzzle is fair, and it is not a political position.

If you find an error, tell me and I will fix it or say why I have not. Corrections are the only feedback that changes the site the same week.

How it is paid for

DailyGeo is free and always has been. Running costs are covered by third-party advertising and by entirely voluntary donations. Nothing is sold to players, there is no paid tier and no feature is withheld from anyone. What is and is not collected, and what the advertising does with cookies, is set out in full on the privacy page.

Contact

Corrections, questions, press, or a note about a clue that is wrong: write to dailymetrolive@gmail.com and it reaches me directly. There is no support team and no ticket system, so replies are personal and occasionally slow.