Where in the USA is this?
A daily geography game where five real photos, all taken within five miles of a randomly chosen U.S. spot, are revealed one at a time as you try to guess the location in five tries.
"Where in the USA is this?" is a daily geography game from The Pudding. Each day it picks one spot somewhere in the United States and shows you five real photos taken within five miles of it, and you get five guesses to figure out where you are.
What is Where in the USA is this??
Every day the game generates a random U.S. location and pulls five photographs that were all taken within a five mile radius of that spot. The photos are drawn from a pool of roughly 500,000 geo-tagged images on Wikimedia Commons, so you are looking at real snapshots people uploaded of streets, buildings, landscapes, and signage rather than curated tourism shots or Street View panoramas. You see one photo first, then submit your best guess for the location. A new photo from the same five mile radius is revealed after each guess, so you build up more visual evidence as your five attempts go on.
What separates this from most map-guessing games is where the photos come from and how they are revealed. Street View-based games hand you a full 360 degree panorama and often let you look around at will. This game gives you a single still photo at a time, sourced from ordinary people's Commons uploads, and narrows the whole search to the USA instead of the entire globe. That changes what you are actually reading for: regional plant life, road sign style, architecture, and local business names carry more weight than the kind of global-scale reasoning a worldwide geo-guesser rewards.
The game comes from The Pudding, a digital publication known for data-driven visual storytelling and interactive projects. The page credits the game to the publication as a whole rather than to any individual author, and it does not display a launch date.
After each guess the game shows a color-coded tile keyed to how far off you were, with distance bands running from an exact hit through under 100 miles and 100 to 200 miles up to more than 200 miles away. The page also tracks and displays your stats, including games played, your average best guess, and a distribution of your past guesses, which fits the publication's data-focused style.
How to play Where in the USA is this?
- Open "Where in the USA is this?" at pudding.cool.
- Look closely at the first revealed photo for clues like vegetation, architecture, signage, or terrain.
- Submit your best guess for the location.
- Check the resulting color-coded tile to see how far off you were; the distance bands run from an exact hit to more than 200 miles away.
- Use the next photo that is revealed, taken from the same five mile radius, to refine or correct your guess.
- Keep guessing until you pinpoint the location or use up all five guesses for the day.
Tips and strategy
- Read the first photo for broad regional signals, like plant life or climate cues, before trying to name a specific city.
- Avoid locking onto one exact city on your first guess; a region-level guess lets the distance feedback tell you whether you are even in the right part of the country.
- Use each guess's distance band to decide your next move: under 100 miles means refine locally, while more than 200 miles means jump to a different region entirely.
- Watch for small, specific details in later photos, like business names or road signage, since these narrow things down faster than scenery alone.
- Remember all five photos sit within the same five mile radius, so once you're confident about the area, use the remaining photos to fine-tune rather than second-guess the whole region.
- Play daily and check your stats over time if you want to track whether your average best guess is improving.
Good to know
- Category
- Geography
- Resets
- Daily
- Cost
- Free
- Guesses
- 5 per day
- Feedback
- Color-coded distance tiles (exact hit to 200+ miles)
- Photo source
- Wikimedia Commons (about 500,000 geo-tagged images)
- Creator
- The Pudding
- Platform
- Web browser
Where in the USA is this? FAQ
Is "Where in the USA is this?" free to play?
Yes, it's free to play at pudding.cool.
How do you play it?
You get five photos taken within five miles of a randomly chosen U.S. location, revealed one at a time. You have five guesses to identify the location, and each guess shows a color-coded tile based on how far off you were.
Does it reset daily, and is there an archive of past puzzles?
The location and photo set change daily. No archive of past daily puzzles was found on the site.
Is it like Wordle?
It shares Wordle's daily, one-puzzle-per-day format and color-coded feedback, but instead of guessing letters you're guessing a real-world U.S. location from photos.
Who made "Where in the USA is this?"
It was made by The Pudding, a digital publication known for data-driven visual storytelling and interactive projects.