MapTap names five places a day, and you find each one by spinning a 3D globe and tapping as close as you can. Distance sets your round score, a difficulty multiplier scales it, and there is no undo once you tap.
How one tap is scored
Each round shows a place with a label such as "Easy - 1x Multiplier", "Medium - 2x Multiplier" or "Hard - 3x Multiplier". You drag to spin the globe, scroll to zoom, then tap once. The answer card gives the miss in kilometres, the round score out of 100 and, for cities, the population. A first visit opens with a practice tap on New York City that does not count.
Because the last rounds are worth up to three times as much, a sloppy Easy round costs far less than a sloppy Hard one.
Our #859 game: Istanbul to Utqiaġvik
We replayed MapTap #859 (28 October 2026) on a laptop, mouse in hand, and finished on 950. The five places got steadily harder:
| Round | Place | Miss | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Easy (1x) | Istanbul, Türkiye | 107 km | 98 |
| Easy (1x) | Valley of the Kings, Egypt | 128 km | 97 |
| Medium (2x) | Johannesburg, South Africa | 267 km | 94 |
| Hard (3x) | Hradec Králové, Czechia | 112 km | 98 |
| Hard (3x) | Utqiaġvik (Barrow), Alaska | 436 km | 91 |
The scoring is generous. A miss of a few hundred kilometres still earns over 90, so the real contest is between 90 and 100. Our 436 km miss on Utqiaġvik cost 27 points after tripling. That is more than the Istanbul and Egypt misses cost combined.
The hardest part was not knowing where the places are. It was steering the globe. Dragging toward the pole to reach northern Alaska kept flipping the view past the Arctic. Over a long drag, the globe moved further than our hand did. Zooming in before tapping fixed most of that.
The story after round five
After the last tap, the game shows a short illustrated story about that place, scrolling up over the globe. Ours told the October 1988 rescue of three grey whales trapped in sea ice near Utqiaġvik. In the story, the local Iñupiat community cut breathing holes with chainsaws until a Soviet icebreaker came to help. The photo was credited to NOAA Fisheries. MapTap's Google Play listing says each day's places are tied to real events from that date. The whale story is the part we remembered after the score.
A menu holds the rest: prior days, Practice Levels, player-made levels, an atlas, saved stories, groups and Versus. Opening the menu even unlocks a joke achievement called "Button Pusher". The paid MapTap+ tier adds sharper satellite imagery, the last 90 days of games, private groups and custom drills. The Play listing says the daily game itself has no ads.
Who makes it
John Donham launched MapTap in August 2024 as a weekend project. In a LinkedIn post at launch, he said he built it to brush up on old programming skills after enjoying games like Wordle, Waffle and Framed. It now has iOS and Android apps alongside maptap.gg.
Tips from our game
- Zoom before every Hard round. Rounds four and five carry triple points, so spend your extra seconds there.
- Drag in short strokes near the poles. Long drags overshoot. Two short drags reached Alaska more reliably than one long one.
- Read the story. It is the only part of MapTap that changes how you think about a place. It also explains why that place was chosen for the date.
