I read a few articles a couple years ago about how our hippocampi, the part of the brain responsible for orienting us to where we are that we use for finding places sans GPS, are shrinking because of our reliance on GPS. Even on short trips and routes that are very familiar to me, I still use GPS because it shows where the police are posted, road hazards, etc. After I read the articles, I will use GPS to get to a new place, and then I’ll turn it off on the way back which has led to some interesting adventures.

Enter Geoguessing. It’s a web based game that drops you in the middle of seemingly nowhere and the goal is to pinpoint where you are on a map. To do this, you use clues to inform you of the nearby cities or highways gleaned from Google street view images like the one pictured above. You click on a part of the map to which you want to go, so it’s like you’re driving slowly wherever the game put you. I started out in the United States which proved to be harder than I imagined. I was dropped in Minnesota, Southern California, Amarillo Texas (which I got right away), Seattle, and a city just outside of Seattle. Once I got a good feel for what I was looking for, I expanded my map to Europe. In Europe, I navigated through a western Russian town, Chezchia, Spain, France, and Denmark. The less the regional language is like English, the harder it is. I just wrote down the symbols on signs and found those same symbols on the map.

It is SO challenging and the perfect game for Covid times when we can’t travel as much as we would like. And the best part? My brain is loving the new connections I’m making. I can almost feel it rewiring as I traverse through tiny eastern European towns. Ugh. I seriously love this game.

Give it a whirl here! What do you think?

xMaegan