Everything you need to know before your first round: how a game runs, how the map works, how scoring is calculated, and what each mode and difficulty actually changes.
CityDrop is a geography guessing game played on a world map. Each round gives you a place by name — a city, a country or a landmark — and your job is to put a pin on the map where you think it is. You get one guess per round, and the closer your pin is to the real answer, the more points you score.
A standard game is five rounds, with up to 1,000 points per round, so a perfect game is 5,000 points.
Every round is worth up to 1,000 points, and the game total is simply the sum of your five rounds. Your distance is measured in a straight line across the globe (the great-circle distance between your pin and the real answer), so it is the same whether you are guessing across a city or across an ocean.
Cities and Landmarks are scored on distance to the exact spot, with points dropping as you get further away:
Countries use a much more forgiving curve built around how big countries actually are. A click anywhere inside the correct country's borders — even right on its edge — scores the full 1,000. Outside the borders, points fade gradually with distance:
The results screen also shows your accuracy for the round as a percentage, which is just your round score divided by 10. A 900-point round is 90% accurate.
Distance is the single number that decides your score, so it is worth knowing how the bands feel in practice:
Some landmark questions cover an entire region — the Sahara Desert, the Amazon Rainforest, the Great Barrier Reef and a handful of others. For those, a click anywhere inside the area counts as a perfect answer, so aim for the middle and stop worrying about the exact metre.
Outside Countries mode you can also narrow a game down: play the whole world, a single continent (Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, South America or Oceania), or one country from the playable list — Australia, the United States, the United Kingdom, China and India. Countries mode itself is always played at world or continent level, because a country question inside a single country would give the answer away.
A game is five rounds, and each round gives you one location. Practice is unlimited — play as many games as you want, in any mode, at any difficulty, with no timer. Your practice results build up your personal statistics, XP and achievements.
Ordinary practice games do not appear on the daily board; they feed your XP, statistics and achievements instead. Guests can play everything, but only scores attached to an account are saved permanently and ranked.
Achievements unlock as you play and are grouped by what they reward: accuracy (guesses within 1 km, within 100 metres, perfect rounds), streaks, gameplay milestones, each of the three modes, Hardcore, the Daily Challenge, high scores and level milestones. Every achievement grants bonus XP the first time it unlocks.
XP feeds your level, which runs from 1 to 50. Levels need progressively more XP, so the early ones come quickly and the later ones are a genuine long-term goal. You can browse everything on the achievements page.
No. Every mode can be played as a guest, and guest progress is kept on your own device. Creating a free account (email and password, or Google sign-in) saves your scores, statistics, XP and achievements to your account so they follow you across devices and browsers, puts you on the leaderboards, and lets you pick a username. You can delete your account and its game data at any time from your profile.
The Geography Guide covers the things that actually move your scores: reading city-name patterns, using coastlines and climate bands as clues, learning regions and neighbour chains, and a practice routine that fits how CityDrop scores. If you would rather just start playing, the FAQ answers the quick questions.
Five rounds, 1,000 points each. No download and no account needed.