Unzoomed
Guess the location as the map zooms out.
Unzoomed hands you an aerial photo cropped so tight you can barely tell what you're looking at, and asks you to name the city. Every wrong guess zooms the image out a bit further and tells you how far off you were, so the puzzle gradually reveals more coastline, roads, and terrain as your guesses run out.
What is Unzoomed?
Unzoomed is a daily geography guessing game built around a single city photo. The image starts as a close crop of a satellite or aerial view, showing little more than texture, color, and maybe a sliver of coastline or a road pattern. You type a city name as your guess. If you're wrong, the game tells you how far your guess is from the real answer, in kilometers or miles, and zooms the picture out a notch, exposing more of the surrounding area for your next try. You get six guesses to land on the right city before the round ends.
The photo itself makes Unzoomed different from other geography games. Instead of a country outline (like Worldle) or a street-level panorama (like GeoGuessr), you're working from an overhead aerial image, and the view is interactive, much like Google Maps: you can pan and zoom within the confines of whatever the current guess level has revealed. The puzzle rewards the kind of visual pattern reading you'd use to identify a place from a plane window: street patterns, roof colors and materials, tree types, bodies of water, even the direction of shadows and the quality of the imagery all serve as clues.
Unzoomed was created by Benjamin Tran Dinh, a French software engineer and self-described map nerd who works at a Parisian startup and builds map games and visualizations on the side. His earlier projects include Chronotrains, a map showing how far you can travel by train across Europe, and Metro Memory, which asks you to name every subway stop in a city from memory. Unzoomed launched in early 2024, and its archive of past daily puzzles stretches back to January 19, 2024, so you can go back and play earlier cities you missed.
Like Wordle, each day's puzzle is the same for everyone, and the distance readouts work as a hot-and-cold signal: a guess thousands of kilometers off tells you to change continents, while a near miss tells you to start naming neighbors. It's a low-pressure, single-round-a-day game: no timer beyond your own patience, no lives system beyond the six tries, just one photo to place correctly before a new city arrives tomorrow.
How to play Unzoomed
- Open Unzoomed at unzoomed.com
- Look at the tightly cropped aerial image shown for the day and study whatever color, texture, or shapes are visible; you can pan and zoom within the revealed area
- Type your best guess for the city shown in the photo
- Check the distance feedback telling you how far your guess is from the correct city, and watch the image zoom out to reveal more surrounding area
- Use the newly revealed terrain, coastline, or urban layout along with the distance hint to narrow down your next guess
- Keep guessing until you identify the city correctly or use up your six guesses for the day
Tips and strategy
- Before guessing, scan the crop for anything distinctive: a river bend, a coastline, a desert texture, snow, or a dense street grid, since these narrow down the region fast
- Use your first guess as a scouting move. Even an off-base guess gives you a distance reading that tells you roughly how far away the real city is
- Pay attention to color and texture as much as shape. Reddish soil, deep green farmland, roof colors, and dense urban grey each point toward different parts of the world
- Don't spend your early guesses on wildly different regions. Once the distance readings narrow things down, guess cities within that same general area rather than jumping around the globe
- As the image zooms out each round, look for road patterns and building density, since sprawling grid cities read very differently from dense old-world street layouts
- If you're unsure between a few cities in the same region, guess the largest or most well known one first, since it's more likely to be the featured city in a daily puzzle
Good to know
- Category
- Geography
- Guesses
- 6 per day
- Resets
- Daily, one new city per day
- Cost
- Free to play
- Modes
- Single daily puzzle
- Archive
- Yes, past daily puzzles back to January 19, 2024
- Creator
- Benjamin Tran Dinh
- Also by the creator
- Chronotrains, Metro Memory
Unzoomed FAQ
Is Unzoomed free to play?
Yes. Unzoomed is a free daily browser game with no cost to play.
How do you play Unzoomed?
You're shown a tightly cropped aerial photo of a city and have to guess which city it is. Each wrong guess zooms the image out further and tells you how far your guess was from the correct city, and you get six guesses per day.
Does Unzoomed have an archive of past puzzles?
Yes. Unzoomed has an archive of previous daily puzzles you can go back and play, going back to January 19, 2024.
Is Unzoomed like Wordle?
It follows the same daily-puzzle, limited-guesses format as Wordle, but instead of guessing a word, you're identifying a city from an aerial image that gradually zooms out with each guess.
Who made Unzoomed?
Unzoomed was created by Benjamin Tran Dinh, a French software engineer who also made the map games Chronotrains and Metro Memory.