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2/ Where better to begin than legendary board game "Risk".

Played on a world map with 42 territories across 6 continents, players deploy armies, conquer territories, and control continents to gain reinforcements and dominate the board.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_(game)

Risk’s popularity (who doesn't enjoy invading Irkutsk??) saw spin-off games created, each with beautiful maps. For example the Lord of the Rings version below.

3/ Next up is “Ticket to Ride”.

In this route-building game players connect cities by rail across detailed maps. The most popular versions are North America and Europe. but there are also region-specific versions including Germany and Scandinavia and countless add-on extension packs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticket_to_Ride_(board_game)

4/ Settlers of Catan is a massively popular resource management game where players build settlements, roads, and cities on a modular hexagonal map, designed randomly at the start of each game. Players gather resources and trade to expand their territory, competing to earn points. Expansions, like Seafarers and Cities & Knights, add new elements such as ships and advanced city-building.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catan

5/ Moving away from board games, let’s consider casual online games like Seterra and Worldle.

Seterra is an online quiz collection with over 400 games on the flags, mountains, rivers, cities and regions of the world, divided roughly by continent. It is quite the selection, providing hours of educational fun.

https://www.seterra.com/#quizzes

6/ Meanwhile Worldle requires players to guess the country based on a map outline, before testing their knowledge through a number of bonus rounds focusing on capitals, spoken languages and more.

https://worldle.teuteuf.fr

7/ There are many variants of these country guessing games.

Consider Globle. Using “hot or cold” hints familiar to kids worldwide, Globle players have to guess a mystery country. It's hard and fun!

https://globle-game.com

They have a similar concept for capital cities:
https://globle-capitals.com/

8/ The most famous geo guessing game on the web though is GeoGuessr, powered by Google Street View.

Players are dropped in random locations and have to quickly guess where they are.

https://www.geoguessr.com

Top players are SCHOCKINGLY good.

There is a GeoGuessr World Cup

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7rKQcoEnOw

Be warned - it can make for compulsive viewing

9/ Finally, the most complex geo games of all: video games.

We start by reading this fascinating piece on video game cartography, paying particular attention to the bit on the Aegean Sea in Assassin's Creed
https://canadiangeographic.ca/articles/inside-the-intricate-world-of-video-game-cartography/

Spot the difference between maps in real life and the game in the images below.

10/ A very famous category of map-based games is flight simulators.

These days players can fly "anywhere", and the map data is often from real world sources like #OpenStreetMap

This lead to a funny situation in the 2020 version of Microsoft Flight Simulator when a typo in OSM lead to a 200 floor skyscraper in Melbourne, Australia

https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/21/21395084/microsoft-flight-simulator-melbourne-obelish-openstreetmap-bing-maps-data-glitch

11/ Many widely-played video game titles, including the hugely popular Spider-Man games of recent years, are distinguished by excellent, quasi-accurate maps.

Check out this video for tour of Spider-Man’s New York City.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SHwlKDv6_o

12/ Finally, there are even video games that don’t just rely on detailed maps, but are actually about map making!

Consider “Map Map”, a soon to be released video game about cartography.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/2702260/Map_Map__A_Game_About_Maps/

Lukas Hort, One of the game designers, was a guest on the @geomob podcast a few months back, have a listen: https://thegeomob.com/podcast/episode-240

13/ Of course we also run our own geo game here on Mastodon.

On the final Friday of each month we play #fridaygeotrivia a real time trivia contest.

All the past questions are up on our blog, quiz yourself:
https://blog.opencagedata.com/tagged/fridaygeotrivia

14/ This list is obviously just the tip of the iceberg.

There are many, many more games that draw inspiration from geography and maps.

But in the spirit of #geoweirdness we leave you with the delightful, and truly weird, game "Mornington Crescent"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OjOsOB4erZI

We featured it in our recent thread about the London Underground map.
https://en.osm.town/@opencage/113131113309782503

15/ Thanks for reading and sharing. What's your favorite geo game? What's the best geo game to give as a gift ?

If you enjoyed this thread, we have many more about specific countries and regions, border disputes, geocoding, etc over on our blog:

https://blog.opencagedata.com/geothreads

@opencage My personal favourite geographic tabletop game is Maponimoes - if you want to play with more players, simply add on another continent!

https://www.mapominoes.com/