BookRank Atlas: a daily riddle about places from books (I made it)
I made this one. It's a daily geography guess, except the place comes from a book: Hogwarts, Macondo, Maycomb, the Hundred Acre Wood. You pick a continent, then a country, and get a row of five squares: all green for the right country, fewer greens the farther off you are. Afterwards, a short note explains where the place is and links a source.
A few places aren't on Earth at all; on those days any answer is correct. You can play missed days from the calendar. There's no account; results stay in your browser.
The copy button gives you something like this:
BookRank Atlas #<day> — <place>
🟩🟩🟩🟨⬛ 840 km
https://openbookrank.com/en/atlas/riddle
https://openbookrank.com/en/atlas/riddle
Full disclosure: it's part of a book-ranking site that earns from Amazon affiliate links on book pages (each result links to the book's page). The game itself has no ads. I'd love to hear if a place feels unfair or a source looks shaky.
https://openbookrank.com/en/atlas/riddleOpen linkView original on lemmy.zip
4 replies
It seems like most of the answers are USA or UK. Or, free choice. It might be better to try and bring in variety on purpose.
Fair point, and thanks for playing. The first round of 31 places leans hard on English-language classics, and the "not on Earth" days are free answers, so it can feel samey. I'd like to widen it with places from other literatures that readers can still pin on a map. Any books you'd want in there?
Ninr in particular, but there are a bunch of classics in English that are set in different countries. I'd add count of Monte Cristo, shogun, wild swans, fatherland as a start. From a planning point if view, it might work to pick a country and then find a book that matches as the clue.
Good list, thanks. Fatherland would work nicely: the whole book is Berlin, just bent by an alternate history. The Count of Monte Cristo gives you the Château d'If off Marseille, and Shōgun opens in Anjiro, a fishing village Clavell invented, so you'd be hunting a stretch of Japanese coast rather than a city. Wild Swans is a memoir, so its places are real ones, a slightly different kind of clue but still a fair one.
And I like the country-first idea. It's the simplest way to keep the list from drifting back to London and New England. These go on the shortlist for the next batch.