Blank Atlas is a map of the world with every name rubbed off. Find the country, find the capital, drop a pin as close as you can - alone, or at a table of phones in the same room.
About Blank Atlas
A question comes up - a country, a capital, a city - and all you have is the map. Put the pin where you think it goes and lock it in. Inside a country's border scores it in full, and outside, the score falls away in a straight line to nothing at a distance set by how big the country is. A city scores in full inside a circle round it, and fades over the few hundred kilometres past that. You choose how many points a question is worth and how long you get, from five seconds to two minutes.
Three maps, all of them flat and north up, so the pin means the same thing on each. Simple is drawn here from the borders the app ships with: no network, no key, the one a table in a field can always play on. OpenStreetMap is the default, with offline packs you can download when you want them - the world to zoom 5, or a continent in more detail - and delete when you do not. Google is there too. Place names are a setting, and they are off by default, which is rather the point.
Alone it is a challenge, or the arcade's levels. At a table, one phone hosts over Wi-Fi, a hotspot, Bluetooth or Nearby and the others join it, with no internet needed on the Simple map. Before a table starts, the phones compare what atlas data each of them actually has, and the game only asks about places every phone knows - so an older install never costs somebody a question they could not have answered.
The atlas is built from Natural Earth's public-domain data: 198 countries and the 195 capitals that are agreed. Borders are a careful matter, so each phone draws its own government's view of them, chosen from the country the phone is in rather than from a setting, and the disputed areas elsewhere are washed and dashed over the land rather than quietly assigned.
Features
- A map with no labels: find the country, the capital or the city and drop a pin
- Scoring by distance, in full inside the border and falling away outside it
- Points a question (100 to 5000) and time a question (5 to 120 seconds), both yours to set
- Three maps - Simple, OpenStreetMap and Google - all flat and north up
- Offline map packs, downloaded when you ask and really deleted when you delete them
- 198 countries and 195 capitals, from Natural Earth's public-domain data
- Each phone draws its own country's view of the borders
- Alone, or at a table of nearby phones over Wi-Fi, a hotspot, Bluetooth or Nearby
- A table only asks about places every phone at it knows