Pin Point

My Journey Into Geoguessr (And Why I'm So Bad at It)

Daniel CunninghamMar 12, 2025geoguessr-challenges-and-community

My Journey into GeoGuessr (And Why I'm So Bad at It)

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about myself, it’s that my geography skills are not great. You’d think that having lived in Germany for a while and traveled across Europe for work would have given me a decent sense of place, but no. Drop me in a random spot on GeoGuessr, and I’m just as likely to guess Canada when it’s actually Poland. But I love it so much.

So, in an effort to improve in my geography knowledge, I’ve started a little project: Pin Point – a website to help me (and hopefully others) get better at recognizing places, flags, and scripts more quickly.

A Bit of Background

I’m originally from the UK but spent two years living in Kassel, Germany, before moving back to the east of England. While I was working in Germany, I did pick up a bit of the language, but when I lived there it was peak COVID lockdowns, so I didn't speak to many people. But what really helped during my peak ability to converse in the language, was how some language-learning websites like german.net, approached the process. Their quick-fire, keyboard-only approach made it easy to drill words at speed. It got me thinking: what if I took the same idea but applied it to geography?

The Idea Behind Pin Point

Pin Point is my attempt to take that fast-paced, no-frills learning approach and apply it to things like:

  • Flag identification – because, let’s be honest, some of them look way too similar.
  • Script recognition – ever mistaken Thai for Khmer? Just me? Okay then.
  • Other quick-fire geography-based skills – TBD as I figure out where my gaps are (spoiler: everywhere).

The goal is simple: no endless menus, no slow animations – just rapid-fire learning that forces you to get quicker and better over time.

The Travel That Should Have Helped

Ironically, my job used to involve a fair bit of travel. I worked in biotech installing drug manufacturing systems across Europe. That meant trips to Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Ukraine… you’d think all that airport hopping and city wandering would have left me with an instinct for recognizing different places.

It didn’t.

But it did leave me with some fun experiences, like getting thoroughly drunk in Austria with locals, struggling with Swiss German, and realizing that Dutch road signs are just close enough to English to be misleading.

So, What’s Next?

I’ll be sharing my progress on Pin Point and maybe even documenting my (hopefully) improving skills in GeoGuessr. I'm currently working on deploying the newly made database as described here but once that's done, I'll begin work on those quick-fire quizzes I was talking about.

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