About Atless

Atless is a daily geography game played on a blank globe. There are no coastlines and no borders, just the North Pole, the equator and a grid, and each of five rounds names a city for you to find on it.

How to play

1. Read the round's city. Nothing on the globe shows where it is, so you place it from what you know.
2. Reveal one reference city if you want a landmark. Type the first three letters of its name, pick it from the list, and it appears on the globe as a point to steer by. You get one a round.
3. Spin and zoom the globe, drop your pin where you think the city is, and lock it in. The real map then draws in, with the answer, your pin and the miss between them.
4. Five rounds make a game.

Scoring

A round is out of 10,000 and a game out of 50,000. Half of each round is for the pin: within 50 km of the city it earns the full 5,000, and the points fall away as the miss grows, to 3,830 at 1,000 km and 844 at 5,000 km.

The other half is for what your reference city gave away, and you keep what it did not. 2,500 is for its size: a city of 150,000 people or fewer costs nothing, and one of 5,000,000 or more costs all of it. The other 2,500 is for its distance from the answer: a city 5,000 km away or more costs nothing, and the closer it sits, the more it costs. Reveal nothing and you keep the whole 5,000.

Tips

• Pick a small city you can place, on roughly the same latitude or longitude as the answer. It costs little and gives you a line to steer by.
• Use the distance line. Once a reference city is on the globe, the line from your pin to it reads out the distance, in kilometres or miles, so you can drag the pin to where the city should be.
• Get the hemisphere and the latitude right before anything else. A miss of thousands of kilometres leaves a fraction of the pin's 5,000.
• If you know the city cold, skip the reveal: the pin alone can earn the round's full 10,000.

Good to know

Everybody gets the same five cities, new at midnight Eastern. Your first finished run goes on that day's leaderboard, and past days stay playable in the archive. Unlimited deals five fresh cities whenever you like, and ranks nothing.