Terpano

What is Terpano?

Terpano is a free daily geography puzzle. Each day you are shown original illustrations of real places and asked to work out where on Earth each one is, then place a pin on a map. Scoring is by distance: the closer your pin, the more points.

What do I learn from it?

How to read a landscape. After every answer there is a fold marked "Why here?" with the illustrator's own reasoning: which details in the picture point to that place, and why. Puzzles you missed come back after seven and twenty-one days, so the same clue is met again before it is forgotten. Over time the roofs, plants, soils and light of a region become recognisable — knowledge that still works when you look out of a train window.

How is it different from photo-based location games?

Every image is drawn, not photographed. That changes what the puzzle is made of. A photograph leaks accidental evidence — a licence plate, a shop sign, a road marking. An illustration only contains what the artist chose to put there, so the clues are deliberate: the angle of the light, the pitch and material of the roofs, which plants grow and how they are spaced, what the ground is made of. It also means the game is fair to players who do not read the local script, because there is no script to read.

Do I need an account?

No. There is no sign-up, no name, no email and no password. Progress is stored in your own browser. If you want to carry it to another device you can set up a passkey or write down a recovery code — both are optional and neither creates an account.

How do you play a round?

Observe the illustration, pin the map, then reveal. Before answering you can stake a confidence ring: a tighter ring multiplies your score if the answer falls inside it, and scores zero if it does not. Beyond the daily puzzle there is a this-or-that streak mode, a reveal challenge where tiles lift one by one and the multiplier drops as you see more, a practice pool, and spaced repetition that brings back the puzzles you missed after seven and twenty-one days.

Can children play it?

Yes, and it is built so that they can. There is no chat, no social feature, no persistent leaderboard, no account and no text in the pictures. We do not ask for a name, an email or an age. The interface is icon-led so it works before fluent reading, and the answer map is a physical terrain map — mountains, plains, deserts, rivers, glaciers and city dots — with no political borders on it.

What data do you collect?

A random identifier is stored in your browser and sent with your results so the site can show the daily percentile, count returning visitors and see which game modes get played. It is not linked to any identity, is never shared, and is not used for advertising. There are no third-party trackers. Clearing your browser data removes it. The identifier is the same kind for every player, child or adult, and is used only to run the game — never for advertising or profiling.

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Who draws the illustrations?

They are made for Terpano and used nowhere else. The style is deliberately constrained — flat colour, a limited palette, paper grain, no gradients and no photographic detail — so that every readable clue has to be drawn on purpose rather than caught by accident.

What does the name Terpano mean?

Terpano is a word we made up, with two meanings folded in. Ter is taken from terra, the earth, the same ter as in terrain. Pano is taken from panorama, the wide view. Together they mean looking out over the land, which is what the game asks of you every day: look at one drawing and say where on Earth it is.

Who is Pano the marmot?

A marmot's signature move is to pop out of its burrow, stand up on a mound and look out across the valley. It lives in the ground and spends its days watching the distance. That is the name acted out: the mound under its feet, the wide view in its eyes. The yellow curve in the Terpano logo is the mound it leans on. Its name is Pano, the second half of Terpano. Pano is not a geography expert. It does what you do: pops up once a day, takes a look at the world, guesses a rough direction first, then works through the clues one by one. Getting the continent right makes its day. Getting it wrong is fine. There is always tomorrow's mound.