Capitrail

Capitrail is a daily geography game where you fly a trail between world capitals using nothing but a compass and a distance slider. Round one drops you in a real capital, Singapore for example, and tells you to navigate to another, such as Kathmandu. You set a bearing in degrees on a dial and estimate how many miles the great-circle route covers, then submit. The twist that makes it Capitrail rather than a distance quiz: the next round starts from wherever your guess actually landed you, not from the capital you were aiming at. Miss badly and round two begins at a nameless point labelled 'Landing 1' with raw coordinates like -1.2°, -76.1°, and you navigate onward from there.

1. Set the bearing by clicking around the compass dial. It reads out in degrees plus a compass point, so 315 shows as NW.
2. Estimate the great-circle distance on the slider underneath. The round tells you its own bounds, which can run from 62 mi to 12,427 mi, and you can nudge it with the minus and plus buttons or type a value.
3. Hit Submit Guess. The game reveals the correct bearing and the correct distance next to yours, awards points for the round, and tells you how far off your landing point ended up.

The trail structure is the whole reason to bother. Most distance-guessing games reset you to a clean slate every round, which means your mistakes never really cost you anything; Capitrail makes you live in your own error and navigate out of it. Getting lost in the Pacific and having to work out a bearing to Baghdad from there is a better geography lesson than any correct answer would have been. Add the compass, which forces you to think in degrees rather than in vague map gestures, and you have five rounds that leave you measurably better at the thing you were bad at.

Every submission gets three separate verdicts, which is unusually generous. You see the true bearing against yours (Correct 328 deg NNW against a submitted 315 deg NW, for example), the true distance against yours, and then a plain-English miss size: 'Wide!' with 'Guessed point was 10,228 mi off target'. The round score lands on top of that, and the running total sits in the header so you always know what the trail has cost you.

Daily trail

Five linked rounds with the same capital targets for everyone that day. Your landing points are yours alone, so no two trails look identical.

Replay

Re-run the same day's trail from the results screen once you have finished.

• Treat the stated distance range as information. When the slider bottoms out at 62 mi, the game is telling you nothing on this trail is a short hop, and the upper bound is roughly half the earth's circumference rather than a real candidate.
• Bearing is worth more attention than it looks. A guess that is close on distance but 70 degrees off in direction dumps you on the wrong continent, and that wrong continent becomes your starting point for the next round.
• Remember that the bearing is a great-circle heading, not the direction you would draw on a flat map. Aiming at Kathmandu from Singapore is NNW rather than the due north your mental Mercator suggests.
• When you land somewhere absurd, read the coordinates rather than despairing. Knowing you are sitting at 1.3°, 103.8° tells you you are on the equator, and that alone narrows the next bearing enormously.