Sprawl Crawl

Each round shows you a 10 km square of satellite imagery. No labels, no borders, no street view — just the shape of a city seen from orbit. Type your guess, or take five choices for half the points. Ten rounds, one score.

33,000 cities, from Tokyo down to towns of ten thousand people. The difficulty slider runs from "1M and up", which is fair, to "10k and up", which is not.

Play the whole world, or narrow it. Any continent, any region, any single country.

A leaderboard for every setting, and challenge links that deal a friend the exact same ten cities, so you can find out who really reads urban sprawl better.

Special editions: themed rounds like the sixteen World Cup host cities or thirty cruise-ship ports, each city with its own clue.

35 languages, including the fun facts that appear when a city is revealed.

After a while you start recognising places by texture alone: the greenhouses of Almería, the polders of the Netherlands, the grids of the American plains. That moment is the whole game.

Imagery is ESA Sentinel-2 (CC BY 4.0) and the city list is the European Commission's Global Human Settlement urban centre database. The written facts, the quiz clues and the 34 translations were drafted with an LLM and reviewed by hand.

Also on Android and iOS, and at sprawlcrawl.com — one account carries your scores across all of them.