This new game is like Wordle for urban design nerds

There’s a new Wordle in town, except instead of words, you have to guess cities. Unzoomed is a browser-based map game that gives you six attempts to guess the city you’re looking at from above. Similar to Worldle (note the additional “l”) where you have to guess the country based on its shape, Unzoomed has you guess a city based on an interactive map.



But here’s the pickle: Your first guess has to rely on a very zoomed-in portion of a map (think: dense neighborhood with nondescript buildings and what appears to be a snaking, sunken highway). If you guess wrong, the map unzooms a bit further, then further, revealing that the highway was actually a river flowing into a bay, and the city you thought was Buffalo is, in fact, Nagasaki, Japan.



The game could take you anywhere from 5 seconds to longer than I care to admit, and it’s as addictive as it sounds. It’s also the perfect pastime for urban design geeks—and everyone with an understanding of vernacular architecture (or what makes Buffalo different from Nagasaki).



[Image: Unzoomed]



A map game for map nerds



Unzoomed was created by French software engineer Benjamin Tran Dinh, who liked the idea of being “dropped” into an unfamiliar place. He assures me that things are not always as they seem from above. “From area satellite imagery you can see the decisions that urbanists or local politicians make that have completely transformed landscape,” he explains. “Some things that appear very natural from the ground look completely artificial from above.”



[Image: Unzoomed]



A self-described “map nerd,” Tran Dinh works for a Parisian startup, and designs map-based games or visualizations on the side, mostly for himself. Previous projects include Chronotrains , an interactive map that lets you visualize how far you can travel by train within Europe; and Metro Memory , which lets you pick a city then list all the local subway stops you can think of. Tran Dinh is also obsessed with Geoguessr , the geography game that drops you in the middle of somewhere on Google Street View and has you guess where that somewhere actually is. (The game launched in 2013, but unsurprisingly, it boomed in the first year of the pandemic.)



[Image: Unzoomed]



Unzoomed launched a little more than two months ago, and Tran Dinh says he wanted to recreate the feeling he had when he first saw his house on Google Earth. “It was the first time we saw that perspective and it stuck with me,” he says.



Unzoomed is an ideal platform for sleuthing urbanists. At the time of writing, there are 118 cities for you to guess (farewell to those who are about to get lost in the archives). I have guessed a dozen cities so far, each with varying levels of success. The only tangible hint you get with every failed attempt is the distance, in kilometers or miles, from the city you’re trying to guess, but I have thoroughly enjoyed using urban markers to get closer to my destination.  



Some helpful hints



If a city has an army of fans sitting on its rooftops or glued to the side of its buildings, these signal ACs, which screams American city. If the map is dotted with pools, we’re likely somewhere warm. If it is punctuated with roundabouts or sprawling plazas or labyrinthine streets with quaint red roof tiles, we’re probably somewhere in Europe. And if I see an island shaped like a palm tree, well, you know exactly where we are.



[Image: Unzoomed]



About 900 people a day are playing the game today. Tran Dinh says the easiest cities so far have been Rome and Amsterdam, with more than half the players guessing both correctly on the first try. My personal best is guessing Reykjavik on the first try, thanks to its constellation of multicolored roofs and iconic rainbow street .



But don’t blame the designer if you find the opening map too easy or too difficult—Tran Dinh doesn’t actually choose it because he likes to play also. There are 10,000 cities in the world, but to make it accessible to most people, he has narrowed down the list to about 500, giving a bit more weight to important cities while keeping some randomness. (At one point, I had to guess Copenhagen, Berlin, and Warsaw before finally landing, not at all miffed, on Lodz, Poland.)



A word of advice: A single city won’t repeat for 100 days, and you won’t land in the same country for three weeks, so Americans better brush up on their worldwide geography.