A Daily Guessing Game for Austin Geography
I have lived in Austin long enough to have opinions about traffic, but ask me where Govalle is and I would stare at you blankly. I know the names, just can’t tell you much after that.
I wanted to do something about it, but studying a static map didn’t seem like fun. My colleagues and I have been playing MapTap, which asks you to pinpoint cities/countries around the world and I have seen how quickly it helps you learn. The format felt like a perfect fit for my problem. So I decided to build one for Austin: ATXactly.
How a round works
- 📍 Five rounds: two easy, two medium, one hard
- 🎯 100 points each, scaled by how close your tap lands
- ✖️ Multipliers: rounds 1 and 2 count once, 3 and 4 double, round 5 triples
- 🏆 900 is perfect, and I have never come close
- 🌙 One puzzle a day, the same one for everybody, resetting at midnight
The game is heavily inspired by MapTap. What changed is the scale. MapTap asks you to find Latvia on a globe; here everything sits inside one metro area, so the whole game happens in the last few zoom levels, where a couple of hundred meters is the difference between a good guess and a great one.
A neighborhood is a blob, not a pin
The first version stored one latitude and longitude per location and scored the distance from your tap to that point. Fine for the Capitol. Terrible for anywhere with an actual footprint.
Oak Hill is about fifteen kilometers across. A player who confidently taps its far edge is not wrong, they are correct, and the game was handing them a 21. Georgetown was worse: a 13 for an answer inside the town.
So locations with a real boundary now carry that boundary, and the score measures to the polygon edge instead of the centre. Anywhere inside counts as a hit:
| tapping the far edge of | scored before | scores now |
|---|---|---|
| Oak Hill | 21 | 76 |
| Georgetown | 13 | 70 |
Inside a shape the score still eases from 100 at the middle down to 75 at the boundary, so a bullseye beats a technicality.
Where the locations came from
The pool is currently 337 places, pulled from OpenStreetMap and the City of Austin’s open data and will continue to grow and evolve. Originally, Claude extracted a couple thousand candidates, but they were mostly noise. So we worked together to refine the list, pull valid locations, and tie interesting tidbits to each one.
Play it
ATXactly is here. Play it and see if you can get 900. Let the learning commence!