Play

Daily challenge, free play, or a room with friends — with difficulty, rounds, twists and your guide on the same screen.

Pick one, or leave them all unpressed for a different guide each game.

Filter to one conflict. The list is built from the battles actually downloaded, so it matches what is on the map. The year slider still applies on top.

What you see by default

Weather, history, things to do and everyday data — choose once rather than dismissing the same card every day.

A route through the map with a reason for each stop. Layers are put back as they were when you leave.

Repaints the globe itself rather than the panel around it. Works on every basemap and costs nothing to switch — the map is drawn from data, so changing what colour water is repaints every sea on Earth at once.

Dim the map

Takes the brightness out of the basemap so drawn lines — plate boundaries, cables, borders, flight paths — read against it instead of competing with roads and labels. Independent of the light and dark themes, because a pale basemap under a dark panel is its own problem.

Satellite Night Earth

The planet from space at night: city lights, the live day-night line, and a blue atmosphere glow. Pauses the lights itself if the frame rate dips.

Daily story

One thing happening on Earth today, pinned on the globe when the site opens. One fetch a day, nothing in the render loop, and Not today folds it away until tomorrow.

Precipitation Earthquakes (24h) Rocket launches Satellites & ISS Aircraft in flight

Live aircraft positions from OpenSky Network, updated every half minute. Colour and shape follow the type each aircraft broadcasts: ▲ airline flight ▲ wide-body ◆ private or training ● helicopter (only when broadcast) ▲ glider, balloon, drone ▲ unidentified ▪ on the ground . Airline flights fly under an operator callsign; private aircraft fly under their own tail number, which is how these are told apart.

Air routes from the nearest airport   Include the 2014 network

Bright lines are today's movements at the nearest airport, loaded when you switch this on. The 2014 network is a complete but dated picture, off unless you ask for it.

Test relay Coordinate grid

Meridians and parallels, with the equator, the tropics and the polar circles marked. Spacing tightens as you zoom in.

Night side

Where it is dark right now. Computed from the sun's position, not fetched — so it works offline and is never stale.

Shipping chokepoints

Live vessel positions in the world's maritime chokepoints, from AIS. Coverage depends on shore receivers, so some straits are better watched than others \u2014 each one says how much it can see.

Wildlife records Everything recorded Birds Mammals Lizards & snakes Turtles & tortoises Crocodiles & alligators Amphibians Fish Sharks & rays Insects Spiders & scorpions Plants Fungi Month All year

Where species have actually been recorded, from GBIF — 340 years of museum specimens and field observations, pooled from thousands of institutions. Density, not range: it shows where people have looked as much as where things live.

Historical borders US counties &states through time

Every US county and state boundary from 1629 to 2000, from the Newberry Library's Atlas of Historical County Boundaries. 17,727 county shapes, each with the exact date it came into being and the date it stopped. Drag the year slider and the map redraws to that day. Counties appear as you zoom in; states carry the wider view.

Ancient places

Every place the Pleiades gazetteer records from classical antiquity — settlements, forts, villas, sanctuaries, roads and rivers — densest around the Mediterranean and the Near East, which is where the scholarship is. Hollow markers are places whose position is only known roughly.

Food &drink Museums &theatres Historic sites Parks &nature Libraries &learning Markets &community Places of worship Sport &recreation

Nearby places follow what you are looking at — zoom in for a street, out for a district.

A free Ticketmaster key, from developer.ticketmaster.com. Covers ticketed concerts, theatre and sport. The key is stored in this browser and is visible to anyone who inspects the page, so restrict it to your own domain.

Changes where the words come from — articles, place names and the voice. The interface stays in English.

Sound effects

Short synthesised sounds for pins, throws and scores. Nothing is downloaded — they are generated in the browser. Off by default, because sound that starts on its own is rude.

Read aloud

Uses your device's own speech, so nothing is sent anywhere.

Tick to show. Use the arrows on each card to reorder them.

Auto follows your device. Below are alternative styles, if you would rather pick one yourself.

Sets the cards, the map layers and the pin categories together. Adjust anything afterwards and your changes stick. Everything leaves the layers as you have them.

Where the "search" links go. A page can point a link anywhere, but it cannot choose which browser opens it.

US units Test every data source

Runs one request against each service and reports exactly what came back. Use this before reporting a fault — the result says which service is at fault and why.

Your choices are stored in this browser only — they do not follow you to another device, and clearing site data resets them.

Reset everything