Game Rules & How Scoring Works

A game is three rounds long. Each round shows you a single screenshot taken somewhere in Verdansk, along with the full map. Your job is to work out where the player was standing when that screenshot was captured, and mark it.

Click anywhere on the map to drop your marker. You can move it as many times as you like — nothing is locked in until you press Confirm Target. The map supports zoom and pan, so if you have narrowed the location down to a specific street or compound, zoom in and place the marker precisely. A guess that is roughly right in the correct POI will always beat a vague guess in the middle of the map.

Once you confirm, the round is scored immediately and you move on. There is no going back and no skipping, so commit to your best read rather than waiting for certainty.

Each round is worth up to 1,000 points, for a maximum of 3,000 across a full game. The formula is deliberately simple: we measure the straight-line distance between your marker and the true location in map units, then subtract it from 1,000.

So a perfect pin scores 1,000, a guess 150 units away scores 850, and anything 1,000 units or further away scores zero. For scale, the playable map is 1,770 units across — so a guess on the opposite side of Verdansk is worth nothing at all, while merely landing in the right neighbourhood is worth a great deal.

Because every unit costs you exactly one point, there is no threshold to chase and no reason to hedge toward the centre of the map. Improving a guess from 400 units out to 300 is worth precisely as much as improving from 150 to 50. Consistency wins games here: three guesses of 700 beat one perfect round and two blanks.

Most screenshots contain more information than they first appear to. These are the things experienced players check, roughly in order of how much they narrow things down:

• Terrain and season. Snow on the ground and dense conifers put you in the northern third of the map — Dam, Military Base and Quarry. Autumn broadleaf trees and dry grass point south.
• Mountains on the horizon. Verdansk is ringed by peaks. Which direction they sit relative to the camera is often enough to fix your bearing, even when the foreground is featureless.
• Building materials. Corrugated metal and shipping containers mean industrial zones like Storage Town, Port or Lumber. Brick and stucco with shopfronts mean Promenade or Downtown.
• Signage and language. Storefront signs, exit markers and hazard placards are frequently readable and often unique to a single interior.
• Landmarks in the distance. The Stadium dome, the TV Station mast, Downtown's towers and the Dam wall are all visible from a long way off. Two of them in the same frame will triangulate you almost exactly.
• Road surfaces. Paved multi-lane roads, cobbled plazas and dirt tracks are distributed very differently across the map.

If you are still unsure, the Verdansk POI guide covers all nineteen named locations and where each one sits on the map.

The sound mode is a separate three-round game with its own weekly leaderboard. Each round plays you one clip of a single weapon firing and asks you to name it from the armoury. Nothing on screen identifies the gun, and no two rounds in a game use the same one.

Nothing is fetched until you press Play, so read the screen first, then listen. The clock only starts once the clip has finished — a long burst is never harder to answer than a short one — and replaying costs nothing at all: the timer runs to the moment you confirm, however many times you listen in between.

Naming the exact weapon is worth 500, and answering quickly is worth up to 500 more — half the round rides on the gun and half on the clock. That bonus starts falling the moment the clip ends — slowly at first, then faster the longer you take — and is gone at twenty-five seconds, leaving the 500 however long you took. Claiming all of it means answering as the last shot lands, so a 1,000 round is rare and a 3,000 game rarer still. There is never a reason to rush a guess you are not sure of: a wrong gun pays nothing at all, while the wrong gun from the right category pays 250.

Rate of fire separates the categories fastest — SMGs rattle, assault rifles thump, LMGs are slower and heavier, snipers are one crack and a long tail. Two guns from the same family usually differ only in that tail and in how much low end the shot carries, which is what the 250 for a near miss is there to reward.

When your three rounds are done you can submit your total to the global leaderboard under a display name. Boards run weekly, and previous weeks are archived so a strong run stays on the record.

Display names are filtered for profanity and may be removed if they are offensive or impersonate someone else. Scores that could not have been produced by normal play may also be removed. Beyond that there are no rules — using the POI guide, or the map itself, is entirely fair game.