Deutschland: rules

The three game types, their variants and play styles, how the area is chosen, how a distance turns into a score, and what streak, level and experience mean.

The goal

Geography on the map. A place is named, you click it. Depending on the game type these are the 16 federal states, the roughly 400 districts and district-free towns, or towns and villages, where what counts is not hitting an area but the distance.

The three game types

They differ in what is being asked for and in what ends a game.

Federal states: all 16, each exactly once, in random order. What counts is the time you take.
Districts: roughly 400 districts and district-free towns. Finding all of them would no longer be a game but a session, which is why there are three play styles with an end to them.
Towns and villages: five rounds, each naming one place. You drop a marker, and the distance to the real place gives you the points.

The federal states

What counts is the time for all 16. Every misclick adds ten seconds, and the question you got wrong stays until you find it: here every state gets found, the only question is at what price. There are two variants:

With borders: the state borders are drawn in. You have to hit the right area, but you can see where it starts and ends. A solid average here is 24 seconds for all 16.
Without borders: only the outline of Germany. Where the states are is something you have to carry in your head; on a click the border you hit lights up briefly. That is considerably harder, so the average sits at 40 seconds and the experience earned is half as much again.

The districts

Always with borders drawn in, but in three play styles. Unlike the federal states, every click moves on here, wrong ones included: otherwise an unknown district would block the whole game, and in tick tack that led into a downward spiral.

Survival: no time pressure, you can think as long as you like, per question too. A single misclick ends the run, and what counts is how many districts you found until then.
One minute: sixty seconds for everything. Every hit scores a point, every misclick costs one; the score can go negative.
Tick tack: a countdown from one minute. Hits give you time, misclicks take it away. What counts is how long you last in total.

The clock in tick tack

It is the one place in the game where a run accelerates itself. The figures are deliberately plain so you can follow them in your head.

You start with 60 seconds.
The first hit gives you 15 seconds, every further one half a second less. At 3 seconds it stops, the credit goes no lower.
The first misclick costs 5 seconds, and with every hit the penalty grows by half a second, up to 20 at most. It grows with your hits, not with your mistakes: otherwise two slips at the start would make a run unsalvageable.
After 24 hits the credit is at its floor and the penalty at its ceiling. From there the run continues under constant high pressure, and all that matters is how long you can take it.

Towns and villages

Five rounds in which the point is not to hit an area but to be close. There are no variants and no play styles, but there are five difficulty levels.

Each round names a place, you drop a marker on the map and confirm. The map then shows your guess, the real place and the straight line between them.
Up to 100 points per round, up to 500 per game. Within two and a half kilometres you get the full score and the round counts as a bullseye; hit all five and you get the crown.
After that the curve falls away briskly: under five kilometres it is still 99 points, at a hundred kilometres about 15, at two hundred exactly one, and beyond that nothing.
Those figures apply to Germany as a whole. In a smaller area the same kilometre counts for more, in proportion to the square root of the area: inside a single district, twenty kilometres off is already a long way off.
Time does not count. Thinking about a place for a long while costs you nothing but your own time.

The five levels in towns and villages

The level decides how well known the places are. The filter runs on population, and the same performance is worth more experience at a higher level.

Easy: only places with more than 100,000 inhabitants, that is, the major cities. Single value.
Normal: more than 20,000 inhabitants, factor 1.2. Hard: more than 10,000, factor 1.75.
Extreme: more than 1,000 inhabitants, triple value. Expert: every place with no lower bound, five times the value.
The level does not change the points of a round, only which places are drawn and how much experience comes out at the end.
On "expert" there are places even locals do not know. That is not a fault but the level: there it stops being about knowledge and starts being about guessing from the name.

The area

For districts and for towns and villages you can narrow down where you play.

All of Germany or a single federal state. For towns and villages, a single district as well.
Berlin, Hamburg and Bremen cannot be chosen as an area: they consist of one or two districts, and a game inside them would be a single click.
An area with fewer than five matching places is not offered for towns and villages, because five rounds would not come together. Higher levels therefore open up more areas than lower ones.

Experience

Unlike Color and Musik, it does not come from a score here but from what you actually found on the map. Rounding happens per game and upwards, zero stays zero.

With borders: one experience point for an area you got right first time.
Without borders: one and a half points, because the same task without drawn borders is considerably harder.
Get it only after a misclick and you receive three tenths of that. Not nothing: found is found, and someone who works their way to a district did recognise it in the end.
In towns and villages a tenth of the points counts, multiplied by the level factor. Five bullseyes on "expert" are therefore 250 experience points, the same game on "easy" 50.
Checking happens on the server. It knows the sequence of questions and the real coordinates, recomputes every distance and rejects a game whose timings do not fit its own clock.

Streak, level and history

You can play without an account. Your games are still saved, but they belong to nobody.
The first level up costs 20 experience points, the second 40. After that the price grows ever more slowly and approaches 500: the step from level 10 to 11 costs 173, the one from 20 to 21 costs 286.
The flame burns on every day you played. A day runs from midnight to midnight German time, and if you last played yesterday your streak survives and you can continue it today. It applies to Deutschland only.
The history holds every saved game with its type, area and result; for towns and villages it adds a map with your five guesses and the real places.

Tips

Start the federal states "with borders". Without them it is the same task, only without the help that shows you where an area ends.
Play the districts inside a single federal state first. Four hundred districts at once are not practice for a beginner, they are an exam.
In "survival" not clicking beats clicking wrong. No clock is running out, but the first misclick ends the run.
For towns and villages, look at the area: in a small one the scoring curve is tighter, and the same error costs considerably more.
For an unknown place, do not drop the marker in the middle. German place names give the region away: endings in -ingen belong to the south, -ow to the north east, -büttel to the north.
Memorise rivers and coastlines. They are the only lines that stay in the same place even without borders drawn in.

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