<\/p>\nThe MapTap game asks players to pinpoint five specific places around the globe. The closer the pinpoint, the more points earned.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\nFor more than a hundred days, I\u2019ve played it each morning with different groups of friends \u2014 from New Orleans, Ocean Springs, Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City and Denver.<\/p>\n
The game asks players to pinpoint five locations on a world map, going from easiest to hardest, with points increasing as the locations progress in difficulty. Some sites I know well. Some sites I\u2019ve never heard of.<\/p>\n
The kicker is that the maps have no lines \u2014 it\u2019s just the big land masses.<\/p>\n
Keith Long, of New Orleans, has been my friend since grade school. He says that playing this game is like looking at the Milky Way when you\u2019re a kid.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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\u201cYou get that awesome feeling of realizing how vast everything is. India is huge! China is huge! Africa is enormous!\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s also extremely humbling. You think you should know where, say, the Philippines are, but once you\u2019re required to put a pin on a map, you realize you may not know at all.\u201d<\/p>\n
He’s right.<\/p>\n
Without borders, even familiar cities go missing.<\/p>\n
One group of \u201cfriends\u201d I play the game with daily is my younger daughter and her boyfriend in Denver. They say they\u2019ve become quite competitive, leading them to study maps independently.<\/p>\n
My friend James McGuire in Chicago says that \u200aMapTap is a morning routine that doesn’t make him feel bad about looking at his phone. He also likes the trivia blurbs tied to each spot, but what surprised him more was what the game has revealed about his blind spots.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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We both use rivers and natural landmarks to find places we\u2019re familiar with, but Russia and China don\u2019t have the same easily recognizable hints for us. He also plays Wordle every morning with his college roommate and friends \u2014 a habit he’s kept up for years. We put both games in the same category: small rituals that keep us tethered to people we don’t see enough.<\/p>\n
I tracked down John Donham, MapTap\u2019s creator. He says the game is a labor of love.<\/p>\n
Donham had the idea in 2008 but didn’t begin building it until 2023. Last year, about 3,000 people played. Today, more than 2 million do.<\/p>\n
Part of the game’s charm is the stories Donham and his team attach to each place.<\/p>\n
\u201cI generally pick the stories first that I think are the strongest. I aim for geographical, gender, cultural and era diversity. I have so many favorite stories it will fill any article,\u201d he wrote.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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Parachuting beavers, for example.<\/p>\n
When Idaho needed to relocate dozens of beavers into the mountains, they turned them into paratroopers.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s Cecil Chubb, who bought Stonehenge.<\/p>\n
I asked if he had a favorite story about a place, and his answer explains part of why so many people enjoy the game so much.<\/p>\n
\u201cHuman history is so full of all these hopeful, joyful moments,\u201d he wrote. \u201cI don’t know that I could pick one. I think that’s part of why the game exists. Because there are thousands of them.\u201d<\/p>\n
A thousand miles away, someone I love is dropping a pin on a place we’ve never been, and for a second, I can hear the cards flip.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.nola.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I had heard about the hot chocolate at the Prague Main Train Station before I went. A neighbor, a locally famous half-Romani woman in the Slovak village where I lived, told me I could find the best hot chocolate in the world there. It’s been decades since I went and had it, but I still […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2517953,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2517952","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/07\/From-Louisiana-the-sound-of-somewhere-else-geography-game.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2517952","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2517952"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2517952\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2517954,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2517952\/revisions\/2517954"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2517953"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2517952"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2517952"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2517952"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}