← The catalogue · No. 02
Geography puzzle
Town Detective
A city, from above. You have to figure out where in the world you are.
The game
Town Detective drops you above an unnamed city and asks you to name it. You get a top-down map. No street view, no labels, no obvious landmarks. The shape of the city, the river, the coast, whether there's a street grid: that's everything you have.
Every guess costs points, and every wrong guess costs more, so you can't just brute-force the answer. If you're stuck, you can buy hints: hemisphere, city population, country population, continent. Or expand the map outward, where the surrounding geography is often the giveaway.
Three difficulties
Capitals only includes capital cities. Forgiving, good for warming up. Normal draws from the capitals and the most famous cities in each country. This is where most people will spend their time. Hard opens it up to every city the game knows about, which is when you'll need real geography to place them.
Share a round
If a round breaks you, or if you think you did really well, copy the share link in the menu and send it to a friend. They'll get exactly the same round: same city, same starting view. Then you can compare scores.
What's under the hood
Town Detective is built with Leaflet for the maps and a curated dataset of city geometries, population, and country metadata. The hint system self-balances the difficulty: if you need a lot of hints the game lets you pay for them, and if you're confident you don't. It's free to play and runs entirely in your browser.