Using geography clues when guessing a location

• A city question is precise — you need the country and the region inside it. Getting the country right but the wrong end of it still scores 650 to 900, which is far better than nothing.
• A country question is forgiving — anywhere inside the borders is a perfect answer, and a neighbour is still a strong score. Think in regions first and pinpoints second.
• A landmark question rewards recognition — if you know the landmark, you almost always know the city, and the city is compact enough that a reasonable pin scores well.

The fastest structural clue is whether a place is on a coast, on an island, or inland. An island narrows the candidates enormously, and a landlocked country removes every port city from consideration.

• Recognisable shapes — Italy's boot, the Iberian square, Florida's peninsula, India's triangle, the Horn of Africa, the Scandinavian peninsula, the Malay peninsula, Baja California, the Yucatán.
• Island chains — Japan's arc, Indonesia's long chain, the Philippines, the Caribbean arc, New Zealand's two main islands, the Maldives' atolls.
• Landlocked countries — Bolivia, Paraguay, Mongolia, Nepal, Bhutan, Laos, Chad, Niger, Mali, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Malawi, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia, Armenia, Belarus, Moldova, Czechia, Slovakia, Hungary, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Andorra, Serbia, North Macedonia and Vatican City are all inland.
• Two of a kind — Uzbekistan and Liechtenstein are doubly landlocked — every country bordering them is also landlocked. Almost nothing else on the map behaves like that.

Latitude is the most underused clue in guessing games, because it is visible on any map that shows terrain or colouring. Learn five bands and you can place a location within a few hundred kilometres before you know anything else about it.

• 0° to 10° — the equator — hot and wet, rainforest green: the Amazon, the Congo basin, Indonesia, Malaysia, Colombia.
• 10° to 25° — monsoons and savanna — seasonal rain, grasslands: India, Thailand, Vietnam, northern Australia, the Sahel's southern edge.
• 20° to 30° — the world's deserts — the Sahara, Arabia, the Kalahari, the Atacama and Australia's interior all sit at roughly the same latitudes on either side of the equator.
• 30° to 45° — temperate, often Mediterranean — hot dry summers on western coasts: the Mediterranean, California, central Chile, the Cape, southern Australia.
• 50° to 70° — cold and forested — taiga and long winters: Canada, Scandinavia, Siberia, northern Russia.
• Above 66.5° — the Arctic — tundra, ice and the midnight sun: northern Norway, Greenland, northern Canada, Alaska.

Mountain ranges and major rivers are the skeleton of a continent. If you can name the range or river a city sits near, you have usually found the city.

• Ranges that frame a region — the Andes run down South America's west edge; the Rockies down North America's west; the Appalachians up the east; the Alps sit north of Italy; the Pyrenees separate Spain and France; the Urals divide Europe from Asia; the Himalayas and Tian Shan wall off South and Central Asia; the Great Dividing Range runs along eastern Australia.
• Rivers that flow in a memorable direction — the Nile runs north to the Mediterranean through Egypt; the Amazon crosses Brazil west to east; the Mississippi runs north to south through the middle of the United States; the Danube flows west to east across central Europe into the Black Sea; the Volga drains into the Caspian; the Ganges reaches the Bay of Bengal; the Congo crosses the equator twice; the Murray runs through south-eastern Australia.
• Deltas and estuaries — large port cities usually sit on a delta, an estuary or a sheltered bay. If a coastal city name appears next to a wide river mouth, the two facts support each other.

Narrow water is where geography becomes politics, and those points are famous enough to work as anchors: the Strait of Gibraltar between Spain and Morocco, the Bosphorus through Istanbul, the Dardanelles, the Suez Canal, the Panama Canal, the Strait of Hormuz, the Strait of Malacca, Bab-el-Mandeb at the mouth of the Red Sea, the English Channel at Dover, and the Taiwan Strait.

• 1. Region first — a rough regional guess already scores 250 to 650 instead of 0, so never place a pin before you have decided on a region.
• 2. Country second — once you are in the right country, city rounds score 650 and country rounds are usually already won.
• 3. Spot last — zoom in and place the pin where the city centre or landmark actually is. In Cities and Landmarks mode, this final step is what separates 900 from 1,000.

For the country-level version of this — which countries sit next to which — read borders and neighbouring countries, and for the map's own regions see understanding world regions.