"GeoGuessr": The where-am-I world championship takes place this weekend

Debora Pape

29/8/2025

Translation: machine translated

The world is small, but still big. You'll realise that when you play "GeoGuessr". The world championship final will show who knows our planet best, at least geographically.

If you generally have no idea where you are and what's going on, «GeoGuessr» might not be for you. Or maybe it is, because my opening sentence describes the game principle of the popular geography guessing game quite well. «GeoGuessr» is so popular that there is even a world championship. And the final will take place on 29 and 30 August in ... Guess it yourself: a large Danish city on the Baltic Sea.

But you don't have to travel there to watch the World Cup. You can also watch live on YouTube as the finalists try to figure out where they are.

What is «GeoGuessr»?

If you don't know the game, imagine this: You are beamed to a random location on the planet. There, depending on the game mode, you have up to two minutes to look around your surroundings and guess where you have landed. You can't use your mobile, you can't ask anyone and you can't recognise car number plates. Then you enter your location tip on a world map. The closer your suggestion is to your actual location, the more points you get.

The whole thing takes place without futuristic beaming technology, of course, but with the help of Google Street View in the browser. The trick is to quickly look around for clues that can narrow down your location. What climate zone are you in? What language can you read on signs and posters? You can end up in the centre of a well-known city, but also on a road in the hinterland with three sparse bushes and a single car in the opposite lane. If you're lucky, there will be signs indicating the distance to a larger town.

You can play «GeoGuessr» alone or with others. In multiplayer, all participants end up in the same place to keep things fair. After a number of rounds to be determined by the game organiser, the player with the most points wins.

«GeoGuessr» can be used free of charge with an account. The game - or free-to-play alternatives such as Geotastic - lets you take exciting trips around the world and realise how little you know about the places in this world. Header image shows the Letzigrund stadium in Zurich. After all, I was only 400 kilometres off the mark.

«GeoGuessr» World Cup

The «GeoGuessr» World Cup has only been around since 2023. The current season has been running since November 2024. 16 finalists were determined through several online duels and will compete against each other in the final in Copenhagen (now I've revealed it after all). Two of them come from Germany and one from France. Switzerland is not represented. The prize money, which will be divided among all the finalists, amounts to around 110,000 US dollars. Part of this will be financed through crowd funding.

Whoever plays «GeoGuessr» in the World Cup final has acquired a wealth of knowledge in geography, languages and culture. While I sometimes get lost in the continent in «GeoGuessr» and am happy to guess my location correctly within a radius of 500 kilometres, it's a completely different story in the professional league. In the livestream of the 2024 World Cup, you can see from 7:39:45 how the later world champion Mathieu «Blinky» Huet - who, just like his opponent from the final, will also be back in 2025 - looks around for just a few moments and then sets his location to within 1.3 kilometres of a small town in Bolivia.

Debora Pape

Editor

Debora.Pape@galaxus.de

Feels just as comfortable in front of a gaming PC as she does in a hammock in the garden. Likes the Roman Empire, container ships and science fiction books. Focuses mostly on unearthing news stories about IT and smart products.

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