I posted about this game a couple months ago. My friends and I play daily now, sharing our scores in a text thread.
How are the points calculated?
The game is clear that each round is out of 100 and the five rounds have a multiplier 1x-1x-2x-3x-3x.
But how are each round’s scores out of 100 calculated? How are the distances away from target scored? One friend wondered if the game penalized you if your guess was outside the given country’s borders (compared to a guess with same exact range within the given country’s borders).
I reloaded the beginning NYC tutorial repeatedly and logged the resulting points and distances away from target.
THE BIG PICTURE
It’s based on a curve apparently.
Yes, you can get 0.
Where? The “sister spot” completely on the opposite side of the globe of a given point is called the “antipode.” I Googled it, but for NYC it’s a spot southwest of Perth, Australia (on the southwest coast of Australia). The data point in the graph above is on a spit of land in the very southwest of Australia just south of Perth (distance=18,888 km; points=0). NYC’s antipode is actually 1,000 km further southwest, in the middle of the ocean.
How far away are antipodes on Earth? Re: What’s the furthest this graph’s x-axis goes before you start getting closer to NYC again? OR How much further can you get away from NYC and score 0?
From Google:
The largest distance two cities can be separated on Earth is approximately 20,000 kilometers (12,430 miles). This distance represents half the circumference of the Earth, placing the cities at opposite sides of the planet, a position known as antipodes.
Top Farthest City Pairs (While many antipodal points fall in the ocean, several urban areas are very close to being direct antipodes):
- Rosario, Argentina, and Xinghua, China: Often cited as the most distant cities (over 1 million population), with a distance of roughly 19,996 km.
- Chincha Alta, Peru, and Siem Reap, Cambodia: Approx. 20,010 km apart.
- Cuenca, Ecuador, and Shah Alam, Malaysia: Approx. 19,980 km apart.
- Bandung, Indonesia, and Bucaramanga, Colombia: Approx. 19,947 km apart.
- Taipei, Taiwan, and Asunción, Paraguay: Approx. 19,930 km apart.
HIGH SCORE TIERS
How close do you need to be to get those delicious 99 and 100 scores?
23 km away is 100 points, 24 km away is 99 points. 69 km is 99 points, 72 km is 98 points. You’ve been warned.
How big a target is 23 km?
If you find the center of NYC…
…scale and overlay the blurry maptap map with center over a Googlemap with known scale, then map 20 km over the top, you can get a good idea. Inner circle is 10 km wide and outer circle is 20 km wide.
So just outside of that larger circle is what you need to hit for 100 points.
And to close the loop, it doesn’t look like guesses the same distances away from a target are scored differently whether you’re within a country’s borders or not. Curve seems smooth.