Games like Worldle and Globle, for people who think in maps.

What Worldle and Globle are

Worldle shows you the silhouette of a country or territory, once a day, and you have six guesses to name it. Each wrong guess tells you how far away it is and in which direction, so even a bad guess narrows things down.

Globle starts with a blank globe. You guess any country, and it is coloured by how close it is to the mystery one: the warmer the colour, the closer you are. You keep guessing until you find it.

Both reward a mental map more than memorised facts. You do not need to draw every outline; you need to know what is next to what.

What to look for in a game like them

• Feedback you can reason from. Distance and direction turn guessing into navigation.
• Knowledge you already have. Most people know roughly where things are.
• One a day, the same for everybody.

How Huezle is similar, and different

Huezle is a daily puzzle too, the same strip for everyone, and its Weather category leans on exactly the mental map these games train. Each strip is one city over 25 years, 2001 to 2025, one band per year, in one of five measures: temperature, hottest day, coldest night, wind and natural disasters. Knowing where a city sits on the globe tells you what its strip should look like.

The difference is the direction of the question. Worldle gives you a shape and asks for the place. Huezle gives you what happened there and asks you to choose between four cities. There is no distance feedback and one try, so it is closer to one well-reasoned guess than to a search.

Three strips for map lovers

20012025

• Cold
• Mild
• Hot

A city one degree from the equator barely changes: every year sits within about a degree of 27 °C, so the strip is one steady warm band after another. A city far from the equator would sit colder and swing more. Latitude is half the answer.

20012025

• Quiet year
• Some events
• Struck often

This measure counts earthquakes of magnitude 5 or more within 250 km of a city, plus tropical cyclones that passed near it. Only 58 of the 193 cities are active enough to be drawn at all, so the measure itself is a clue: plate boundaries and storm tracks. The bright band here is 2011, the year of the great earthquake off northeastern Japan, and the busiest year for any city in the data.

20012025

• Mild
• Hot
• Scorching

One band stands out: 2010, the summer of the great Russian heat wave, two and a half degrees above any other year on the strip. A single famous year like that can name a city faster than its climate does.

Side by side

For more strips like these, see the hottest cities in the world and the cities most hit by natural disasters, or the Weather category. For a wider list of dailies, see the best daily puzzle games for iPhone. The daily puzzle is free.

Questions