The SSP Canada GeoGuessr League

[Fischbob]

Current Challenge:
Christmas break - check back in the new year for Season 2!


League Info:
The first season of the SSP Canada GeoGuessr League is going to run for 11 weekly challenges, starting the weekend of October 9th and taking us to the finale on the weekend of December 18th. Anyone can enter with a free GeoGuessr account. A link to the weekend's competition will be posted in this thread every Friday evening and players have until that Sunday at 8:00pm Eastern to complete their game. There will be a time limit of 5 minutes per location/guess, and the player with the highest total score at the end of the 11 weeks will be our inaugural champion.

Season 1 Leaderboard and Map Pool

Also stay tuned for non-competitive GeoGuessr challenges posted here every Monday and Wednesday!


Original post below:

TL;DR - I'll be posting Canadian GeoGuessr challenges in this thread for us to play together. The first one is here: https://www.geoguessr.com/challenge/ZvQGXbUlYs5Eflhw

GeoGuessr has been discussed on the forum before and it seems like the type of game that many of us would be quite interested in. What's a bit unfortunate is that a paid subscription is now required to play more than one singleplayer game per day. However, non-paying players can join as many multiplayer challenge games as they like, as long as they are created by someone with a subscription. So, seeing as I have a subscription I thought I would post a challenge for you folks to try! You may have to sign up for an account but won't have to open your pocketbooks in order to play.

The first challenge I'm posting is on the map "A Balanced Canada", with over 50k possible starting locations and promising a "balanced" coverage of the Canadian landmass, whatever that means. There is no time limit and you can move around as much as you want. Access it at the following link: https://www.geoguessr.com/challenge/ZvQGXbUlYs5Eflhw

At the end of the weekend, I'll post a screenshot of the scoreboard and we can see how everyone did!

A couple rules to keep in mind:
1. Try not to use external information sources to help you guess (e.g. Googling place or business names); limit your info to the street view and the in-game map (and your prior geographic knowledge, of course). I realize this is unenforceable so I will be appealing to the honour system here
2. Don't spoil any of the rounds in this thread before I post the final scoreboard - use spoiler tags if you absolutely must share/discuss some juicy info.

Based on this first game I will gauge how much interest there is in having regular (say, weekly) games posted here rotating through various maps. I mostly play North American and urban themed maps but am open to suggestions for what you folks would like to see.

Happy guessing!

[VANRIDERFAN]

18,058.

Love these types of games.

[Dengler Avenue]

Yo it’s geoguessing.

[SignalHillHiker]

Love it.

Mine shagged up and showed me the same place for rounds 4 and 5 - so I never did see where that #5 was in NB, all I could see was somewhere with a 905 area code on a sign again haha.

[Fischbob]

Signal, can you put spoiler tags around your screenshot to keep the surprise for those who haven't played yet?

There appears to be a glitch with this game's Round 5 where it just shows the Round 4 location again and then bugs out when you try to move around. Hopefully subsequent games won't be affected by this...

[SignalHillHiker]

So sorry! I thought we all got different, randomly-generated locations to guess. Sorry!

[Fischbob]

No worries! I didn't really explain it in the OP but yeah, with the Challenge mode the URL generates the same locations for everyone so we can compete for the highest score.

[Proof Sheet]

Originally Posted by Fischbob

No worries! I didn't really explain it in the OP but yeah, with the Challenge mode the URL generates the same locations for everyone so we can compete for the highest score.

Thanks. So it wasn't just me who had #4 and #5 the same location.

Great idea.

https://www.youtube.com/c/GeoWizard This is a good YouTube channel on geoguesser challenges.

https://www.youtube.com/c/GeoWizard/...=dd&shelf_id=7

A very british sense of humour with this guy (ie he has a sense of humour) but for Acajack's benefit not a mention of Alan Partridge as far as I can see.

[JHikka]

Glad to see I wasn't the only one with an issue on 4 & 5.

Is it possible to have more than five in the next quiz or are we limited to five selections?

[Fischbob]

Each game is hardcoded to exactly 5 rounds but I can create and share as many games as I want. I'm open to people's suggestions as to what a good frequency of posting challenges would be. Is there interest in making this a daily thing (as my schedule allows)? Maybe a few different themes at the same time (i.e. one overall Canada, one urban map, one specific province/region) for variety?

[SignalHillHiker]

I mean, hourly would be great. ()

[VANRIDERFAN]

Originally Posted by Fischbob

Each game is hardcoded to exactly 5 rounds but I can create and share as many games as I want. I'm open to people's suggestions as to what a good frequency of posting challenges would be. Is there interest in making this a daily thing (as my schedule allows)?

Daily please!

[JHikka]

Originally Posted by Fischbob

Each game is hardcoded to exactly 5 rounds but I can create and share as many games as I want. I'm open to people's suggestions as to what a good frequency of posting challenges would be. Is there interest in making this a daily thing (as my schedule allows)? Maybe a few different themes at the same time (i.e. one overall Canada, one urban map, one specific province/region) for variety?

Weekly is fine if we're making an actual league and leaderboard of it.

[MonctonRad]

9664 pts, but I misunderstood what I was doing for the first couple of guesses.

[jonny24]

I got 10,560 (or similar, I closed the window) , but didn't realize I could move around. So hopefully I'll do better next time.

And damn - does all of Canada look like it could be somewhere in Ontario?

[Proof Sheet]

Originally Posted by Fischbob

TL;DR - I'll be posting Canadian GeoGuessr challenges in this thread for us to play together. The first one is here: https://www.geoguessr.com/challenge/ZvQGXbUlYs5Eflhw

GeoGuessr has been discussed on the forum before and it seems like the type of game that many of us would be quite interested in. What's a bit unfortunate is that a paid subscription is now required to play more than one singleplayer game per day. However, non-paying players can join as many multiplayer challenge games as they like, as long as they are created by someone with a subscription. So, seeing as I have a subscription I thought I would post a challenge for you folks to try! You may have to sign up for an account but won't have to open your pocketbooks in order to play.

The first challenge I'm posting is on the map "A Balanced Canada", with over 50k possible starting locations and promising a "balanced" coverage of the Canadian landmass, whatever that means. There is no time limit and you can move around as much as you want. Access it at the following link: https://www.geoguessr.com/challenge/ZvQGXbUlYs5Eflhw

At the end of the weekend, I'll post a screenshot of the scoreboard and we can see how everyone did!

A couple rules to keep in mind:
1. Try not to use external information sources to help you guess (e.g. Googling place or business names); limit your info to the street view and the in-game map (and your prior geographic knowledge, of course). I realize this is unenforceable so I will be appealing to the honour system here
2. Don't spoil any of the rounds in this thread before I post the final scoreboard - use spoiler tags if you absolutely must share/discuss some juicy info.

Based on this first game I will gauge how much interest there is in having regular (say, weekly) games posted here rotating through various maps. I mostly play North American and urban themed maps but am open to suggestions for what you folks would like to see.

Happy guessing!

You could do a round of anonymous suburbia Canada and not allow people to scroll around. They are locked in to the image they land on. Let's see how people manage that way.

Milton/Mississauga/Longueuil/Barrhaven/Okotoks/ they all look the same after a while.

[Fischbob]

Thanks for the input everyone. I've put a little more thought into this and am going to propose a schedule of a couple non-competitive games during the week and a weekend league challenge with ongoing score tracking. Something resembling the following:

Funday Monday - Out of the box maps and/or special rules (e.g. time limits, no moving, etc).
Mid-Week Friendly (Wednesday) - A non-competitive challenge on the map that's been picked for the upcoming weekend, for people to get a practice round in before the main event.
Weekend League Match - Challenge is posted Friday evening and participants have until late Sunday to enter. Everyone who appears on the scoreboard at the deadline will have their scores entered into a spreadsheet and will be ranked by their running total for all weeks.

I will take the weekend to flesh this out and choose the map pool and should have more info to share in a couple days. As always I am open to your feedback and suggestions.

Originally Posted by Proof Sheet

You could do a round of anonymous suburbia Canada and not allow people to scroll around. They are locked in to the image they land on. Let's see how people manage that way.

Milton/Mississauga/Longueuil/Barrhaven/Okotoks/ they all look the same after a while.

I like that idea! Did a quick search and there doesn't appear to be an exclusively suburban-themed map for all of Canada. Closest possibilities I'm aware of would be "An Urban Canada" (despite the name you often end up in the suburbs ) or something metro area-specific like "GTA without Toronto". Either of those may be good candidates for a no-move challenge on Funday Monday.

[VANRIDERFAN]

^^
If you can do it, 2 urban, 2 suburban and 1 rural.

[Proof Sheet]

https://www.geoguessr.com/challenge/TQds2yh3xu3bOTry

Here is a geoguessr challenge of only Aldi locations. Big chain in europe.

Canadian equivalents would be guess the location of a Tim's/Boston Pizza/Robin's doughnuts/Michael's etc

[Fischbob]

Okay! So the first season of the SSP Canada GeoGuessr League is going to run for 11 weekly challenges, starting next weekend and taking us to the finale on the weekend of December 18th. Then we'll take a break for the holidays. I've picked the following map pool, which I hope will provide a good variety of Canadian content:

1. Canada (Updated coverage)
2. 100 largest cities of Canada
3. Every Tim Hortons
4. An Urban Canada
5. National Parks of Canada
6. A Balanced Canada
7. A More Urban Canada
8. Where's That McDonalds? (Canada Edition)
9. Cities of Canada
10. Canadian Hockey League Arenas
11. Canada (GeoGuessr Official)

I will provide more information on each map prior to the start of that weekend's competition, and you'll also have a chance to practice it during the Mid-Week Friendly.

The ranked weekend games will be subject to a 5 minute time limit for each location, just to increase the challenge a little bit.

The challenge link will be posted on Friday evening and you'll have until Sunday at 8:00pm Eastern to complete your game. At that time I'll record everyone's scores and update the overall rankings. I'll be sharing a spreadsheet with the leaderboard at the conclusion of the first weekend.

Although we're almost a week away from the start of competition, there are things you can start doing so that you're ready when Friday rolls around. Namely:

1. Create a GeoGuessr account. I don't believe you show up on the scoreboard if you play without an account, so make sure you're logged in before starting the challenge. A free account is sufficient; you don't need a Pro subscription or anything.
2. Set/change your GeoGuessr nickname to what you'd like it to show up as for the competition. You can do this by going to your GeoGuessr profile and clicking "Edit Your Profile" down at the bottom.

Also stay tuned for the inaugural Funday Monday where we will be tackling the 905!

There's one day left in this weekend's pilot challenge and I count 17 of us on the scoreboard so far. If you haven't played yet, get in on the action here: https://www.geoguessr.com/challenge/ZvQGXbUlYs5Eflhw