Beginner’s Guide to Geoguessr
This is one of the most frequently asked questions about Geoguessr, and the reality is that there is not one single right answer. Some people become very good by playing thousands upon thousands of games and grinding through the rounds. Others prefer a much more analytical approach, studying documents and guides, as well as mapping out specific clues, covering everything from vegetation and infrastructure to coverage metas in order to discover new information. The best way to learn and improve will always be the one you enjoy the most.
Playing games of Geoguessr and seeing many rounds is always going to help you improve, however, there are some good practices and external tools that can make the learning process faster.
How do I get better at Geoguessr?
Checking a round after a mistake
One of the most important things to do after making a mistake is to go back to the round and look at it with the knowledge of where the round was. For example, look at things that seem distinct, as seen in the “What to look for in-game” section, and try to match them with clues featured in the Plonk It guides.
This can be both an opportunity to learn new clues or to realize what kind of clues that you already knew about may have missed.
Another very useful thing to do is to check the area around where you made your mistaken guess and note the differences you can find with the actual location.
Playing with the right settings
While the most important thing in every game is to have fun playing, there are some gamemodes and settings that promote learning more than others.
We strongly recommend only playing moving games with the intention of achieving a perfect score in every round. Moving until you find a country specific clue you already know and then guessing in the middle of the country hampers learning new clues. If you are just playing to recognize the country, we recommend playing No move on community-made world maps and using a community-made script to keep track of your streak, instead of playing the official Streaks mode.
Different settings can reward and incentivize knowledge of certain topics. For example, moving games incentivize learning placenames and how the road system of different countries works. Meanwhile, in No Move and NMPZ games niche clues to recognize the country become much more important. Both are legitimate ways of playing Geoguessr and apply different skill sets.
Competitive gamemodes are the way to test your skills against other players, but are generally not a time-effective way to learn. However, the high stakes can incentivize remembering specific clues you did not know that cost you a game.
Reading guides and documents
Community guides and documents are one of the pillars of Geoguessr learning. Many people find researching their favourite countries interesting, and the result can be hundreds of pages worth of documents going into every single thing that can be used to nail a round in that country.
Plonk It Guides: If you are here you probably know about our guides. We aim to make beginner-friendly guides that focus on high yield metas with a really digestible presentation. Guides are generally divided in three steps. The first one focuses on country recognition. Step 2 focuses on regionguessing and Step 3 showcases very specific areas that are recognizable and notable in some way.
Regionguessing Meta Library (link): This sheet collects almost every published document in English about individual countries. It has very useful descriptions of the documents detailing the scope and usefulness of each resource.
GeoHints (link): This site is a massive collection of infrastructure and meta clues categorized by type. Beware that clues are shown without any indication of how common or useful they are, so it is more fit to be used by experienced players that know what they are looking for. Nevertheless, if you are wondering if something exists in a country in terms of infrastructure, if you cannot find it here, it probably does not exist.
Youtube videos: Many Geoguessr youtubers post educational content. From very quick and basic “Tips everyone should know” kind of videos, to hour-long videos about regionguessing a single country, there is a lot to be learned from watching experienced players share their thought process and the clues they use.
External tools
In this section we will list the most common tools used by Geoguessr players to learn outside of the game itself. Note that the scripts require a browser addon such as TamperMonkey.
Map Making App (link): The best tool for clicking around the map to check coverage. It has features to remove the blue lines and dots from unofficial coverage, as well as tags.
Geoguessr Training Script (link - explanatory video): This script allows you to toggle the terrain map as well as the blue coverage lines in-game to help learn the landscape and the extent of the coverage in a country. You can also connect this script with the Map Making App in order to save locations directly from the Geoguessr game into a map of your choice. The script also allows you to turn on and off the compass as well as hiding the Google Car. Be aware that using this script in any competitive gamemode is considered cheating.
geo.emily (link): A website featuring quizzes for learning clues, such as writing systems, phone codes and subdivision names, and also a tool to check when coverage in different regions were added, which can be used to learn camera generation metas as well as seasonal and car metas.
Plonk it Quizzes: In the Plonk It Discord server there is a section where you can take various quizzes, including the subdivisions of countries and many country or region specific clues.
Playing and interacting with other people
The community aspect of Geoguessr is one of the main reasons why the game is alive and well, and why the collective knowledge keeps getting bigger and bigger. Plonk It began years ago as a small group of enthusiastic people that loved Geoguessr, and has now grown to over ten thousand discord members, a finished guide to almost every country in Geoguessr and the most active records leaderboard in the community. This is all thanks to people playing and talking with each other, sharing their research, etc. Feel absolutely free to ask any questions you may have in the Discord server, there is always going to be someone happy to help.
Playing with people with a skill level significantly above or below yours is rarely fun for anyone involved. We recommend finding people around your skill level to play together as a way to make the game more fun and learn. In the Plonk It Discord Server we have a channel called #looking-to-play where you can find other players interested in playing.
Watching YouTube videos, live streams and playing Chatguessr can also be a great way to learn, you can listen to the streamer’s thought process as they play the rounds, and ask in chat what the give-away was after a round that was particularly difficult for you.
What should I focus on?
Most general good practices have been already covered in this section, the following points will be more specific ways to get better.
Focusing on the most effective clues
One big question that many beginners have is what to learn first. Should you learn every bollard in Europe, or should you spend that effort learning different Google cars around the world? This is a hard question to answer, but we can try to answer it from the most general way of “being good at the game”.
Focus on the country identification clues that you encounter more often: As we have discussed previously, the easiest and most consistent ways to identify a country can vary wildly.
In Europe, bollards and poles are a very effective clue, but consistent country identification in No Move rounds can require learning dozens of different small clues per country.
In the Americas landscape is probably the most important clue, as many countries are large and feature several distinct biomes. Poles can be very useful both in country identification and regionguessing. One clue that is particularly useful in Latin America is traffic signs, as almost every country has a distinct design from its neighbours. While car and coverage meta can help a lot, people have achieved very high streaks playing with a script to hide the Google car.
In Asia the most useful clues for each country cover a wide variety of categories, so you will need to learn each country’s best tips. Also, rural rounds in Southeast Asia can be extremely hard, even for experienced players, and they can even be confused with Latin America from time to time.
In Africa, car and coverage metas combined with some basic landscape knowledge can get you the right country every time.
Oceania only has official car coverage in Australia and New Zealand. Both are left-side drive English-speaking countries in the southern hemisphere that look quite different from each other, so learning what they look like and a couple of unique infrastructure clues about each is enough to essentially never miss them.
For small islands and territories, there will almost always be some sort of car meta that gives away the location. In the case of trekkers, the only real way of learning them is to remember each individual trekker. In Geoguessr’s “World” map the same trekkers tend to show up repeatedly. In better maps like A Community World or An Official World all trekkers can be solved by moving around and finding information.
Learn basic regionguessing on the bigger countries: Due to the higher amount of locations in bigger countries and their size, learning how to get the right region can yield very high results, especially in competitive games. It is quite easy to achieve victory from just one good guess in a big country once multipliers ramp up. Despite being generally considered a bigger mistake, going Finland on Sweden or vice versa will be less punishing than not being able to recognize some distinct areas of countries like Russia or Canada.
Having a good strategy for competitive games
When you enter a competitive game, and specifically moving duels, being aware of your strengths and weaknesses can help you make better decisions. Knowing in which countries you can find and use information effectively (where you know a good amount of placenames or regional clues, understand the road system, etc.), making it worth moving around to find it, and on which ones you don’t really have anything and should guess as soon as you are sure there is not any good information around.
Another important thing to consider in moving games is to fully check the information around you and make sure you are not missing a good clue next to you by moving too early. This can be very costly if the opponent does see it. Knowing what is the best direction to move towards can be hard at times, but you should always try to look around and make a conscious decision instead of choosing at random.
Doing practice drills to strengthen your weak points
If you find yourself losing often in the same situations there are some ways to practice specific aspects of your game:
If you struggle against insta-guesses, you should try playing single player games with a short time limit, anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds.
If you struggle in low-information rounds you should play No Move games on rural maps (such as An Arbitrary Rural World) to force yourself to learn more country recognition clues and develop better vibes.
If you have issues in a particular region of the world, playing regional maps or generating a map with only the countries that give you trouble can be an effective way to improve.
If you find yourself losing because of not being able to regionguess some countries, you should play single player games on those specific countries, or on maps that focus only on big countries, such as Less-Extreme Regionguessing or Extreme Regionguessing.
Glossary
5k - A perfect score in Geoguessr. It is commonly used to refer to very close guesses that are not actually 5,000 points.
AI Generated - In “AI generated” maps, locations are chosen by a computer program according to parameters established by the map maker.
Ari - A term used to refer to unofficial coverage. It began as a shortened version of “Autori”, a company that covered Finland extensively and whose coverage would show up frequently in maps that did not take measures against it.
Handpicked: Handpicked maps are those in which every location has been manually selected by the mapmaker.
Hedge - A guess made in a place that is not likely to be the exact location, but is roughly in the centre of the area where the location could be. It aims to minimize points lost, rather than to maximize the score with a risky guess. A “water hedge” is a guess made in the water between the pieces of land that the player considers plausible.
Loc - Short for “location”.
Lowcam - This term refers to the Google camera being mounted lower than usual, usually due to privacy concerns. This leads to a different point of view that can be easily distinguished with experience. It is particularly useful since it only appears in a handful of countries.
Meta - Any type of clue used in Geoguessr. In the Geoguessr community, the meaning of this word has evolved to mean any clue players can use to get a round right, from “meta” (in the original meaning) things such as the Google Car or the camera generation, to completely real items like utility poles, bollards, signs, etc.
Panorama - Commonly shortened as “pano”, it refers to the exact positioning of a location. When you are moving, each click forward is a different panorama.
Pinpointability: Pinpointable maps are those where every location is placed on a distinct map feature, such as an intersection or a bridge, so that you can achieve a perfect score in every round if you put in the effort
Plonk - A guess that has been made without much thought about the exact location.
Rift - A stitching glitch in Street View that can be found in the sky in a handful of countries.
Trekker - A type of Google Street View coverage taken with a camera mounted on a backpack. This type of coverage can be found both in urban areas of major cities, or in the most remote places of the planet. The camera can be mounted to a variety of vehicles, such as boats, zebu-pulled carts, or camels, but it is still considered trekker.
Tripod - A type of Google Street coverage taken with a commercial grade camera placed on a tripod. It is usually only found inside buildings like museums.