Tripgeo has kindly agreed to host another of my map games, bringing geography enthusiasts a fresh and exciting challenge. If you love testing your knowledge of world maps and enjoy puzzles, then my latest game, Jumbled Maps, is perfect for you.
In Jumbled Maps, someone has played a cosmic prank on the world map, and every country place-name label has been randomly displaced. Your mission is simple: restore geographical order by putting each nation back in its rightful place.
To play Jumbled Maps, click on any misplaced country label and type in its correct name. There are 249 countries in total to correct. Country names that you have successfully fixed will be shown with a green outline on the map and will also appear in the map sidebar.
How the Map Works
In essence Jumbled Maps is a very simple game. The game is powered by MapLibre, the flexible and open-source mapping library, with map tiles provided by OpenFreeMap, an open-source platform providing free custom map layers. These map tiles have then been custom styled using Maputnik to remove all country place-name labels from the map layer.
When the map loads, new country place-name labels are displayed on the map in randomly shuffled positions. These labels are retrieved from a GeoJSON dataset. This creates the core challenge of Jumbled Maps, as players must use their geographical knowledge to restore order.
The game also utilizes local storage to track a player’s progress. Any countries that have already been correctly identified are saved and excluded from future shuffles. This means you don’t have to correct all 249 country names in one session - you can return to the game at any time and pick up where you left off!
Also See
If you enjoy Jumbled Maps then you will also love Scrambled Maps, Tripgeo's daily map challenge. Scrambled Map requires you to unscramble the jumbled map tiles of a different city every day.
3 comments:
Suggestions:
- a list of country names ... trying to get all of the names to match the answer is difficult. Is it Russia or the Russian Federation? Is the The Gambia or Gambia? Ivory Coast or Côte d'Ivoire? Maybe the list of countries could include two sections: "correctly named" and "yet to be correctly named"?
- drag/drop would be nice ... county names on tiles that I can slide around with the mouse ... get ride of the typing. I know it's Venezuela/Malyasia/etc, but it took me a couple of tries to get the spelling correct.
- Not sure how to describe this, but a minor frustration. When you start, all the country names are mixed up on the map. As you get them right, names start to disappear. For example, suppose for your first guess, you correctly identify Ireland (which is labeled as China). The name "China" froms the map ... and you've still got a stray "Ireland" out there. I'd like to see the country labeled "Ireland" changed to "China" ... can you make it so that incorrectly labeled countries only contain labels that are still in play? Once a country is labeled correctly, it feels like it should only exist in-game where it truly belongs. This will help speed up the end game where you're sorting thru a list of valid countries.
I don't intend to sound pushy or negative. I love the idea and see a lot of potential. Thank you and I wish you well!
One more quick comment - I did find at least one situation where a country was labeled with it's actual name.
Thanks David, I appreciate the feedback. A tab to switch between ''correctly named" and "yet to be correctly named' is already on my list of future developments.
I didn't go with drag & drop because I wanted to try a different approach from tripgeo's game Map Memory - https://www.tripgeo.com/mapmemory (in the future I might try to do a version of Map Memory which involves country place-name labels.
I get the frustration with not removing the incorrect version of a name when that country is corrected. I'll have to think about how to avoid that. It should be possible as logically there should be an equal number of 'correct' labels left for all the remaining incorrectly named countries (if that makes sense).
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