Globe Quest teaches world geography through play — continents, countries, oceans and famous landmarks, all on a real spinning globe with accurate coordinates.
- Plays offline. No accounts, no ads, no in-app purchases. Your child's name, progress and stickers stay in this browser and are never sent anywhere. Two things do reach the internet, and neither involves your child: anonymous visitor counts, which tell us how many people play and which modes they pick (see the privacy page — blocking them changes nothing about the game), and the ☕ tip jar in the corner of the title screen, which opens a payment site in a new tab if you tap it. The tip is a voluntary thank-you: nothing in the game is locked behind it and nothing unlocks.
- Progress is private. Levels, high score and stickers are saved in this browser only — there is no account and nothing is uploaded. Clearing the browser's site data clears the game too.
- Up to six players. Tap the name at the top of the title screen to switch child — each one keeps their own journey, sticker book and high score. "Start over" on the journey screen gives one player a clean slate without touching the others.
- Little Explorer mode (ages 4–7) has no timer and no way to lose — wrong taps just teach the right name.
- Every wrong answer names what they tapped instead of just buzzing, so mistakes still teach.
- Hot & Cold hints. In Little Explorer mode every miss says how close it was — "boiling", "warm", "freezing" — so a lost child is guided rather than stuck. Older players only get this once they're already struggling.
- Daily Challenge: ten places a day, the same ten for everyone, one attempt. A built-in reason to stop after five minutes instead of playing on and on.
- Name That Place turns the quiz around: the globe lights up a country and they pick its name from four.
- Animal Atlas asks where an animal lives — a panda, a lemur, a polar bear — and they tap its home. The gentlest way in, because a child knows animals long before they know countries.
- Day & Night shades the globe by where the sun actually is at this moment and asks them to find somewhere it's daytime, then somewhere it's dark. Any country on the right side counts. It's the one mode with many correct answers, which is the point: time of day is a place, not a number.
- Equator Explorer is the one mode about the lines rather than the land. It asks for somewhere north of the equator, somewhere south of it, somewhere inside the hot Tropics and somewhere inside the Arctic Circle — drawing and naming each line on the globe as it asks. It marks the spot they actually tapped, not the country's middle, so tapping northern Brazil counts as the Northern Hemisphere: the point is that a country can lie in both.
- Compass Quest lights one country and asks for somewhere north, south, east or west of it, with a compass rose on the globe and an arrow pointing the way. Any country in that quarter of the world counts. It's the mode that turns a map from a picture into directions.
- Clock Around the World is Equator Explorer's companion for the lines that run the other way. It draws the 24 meridians — one per hour — labelled with the time each is keeping at that moment, and asks the child to find where it's seven in the morning, then the Prime Meridian, then the Date Line. It judges by the sun's clock rather than by legal time zones, which bend around borders and skip half hours; the lesson is that time and longitude are the same thing.
- Coordinate Rescue is the one for older children and puts the two together: somebody is lost at 30° north, 30° east, the grid is drawn with every line numbered, and they read their way to the crossing. Landing there tells them what is actually at those coordinates — a country, or which ocean they've splashed into.
- Border Patrol lights one country violet and asks for any country that touches it. Several answers are always right, the neighbours are read off the real borders on the map, and the fact afterwards explains what a land border means — you could walk from one into the other without crossing water.
- City Lights names a capital — Cairo, Oslo, Lima — and asks which country it belongs to, which is the direction that's actually useful when a city comes up on the news. The city only appears on the globe once the country is found, so it's the reward rather than the clue, and the fact is about the city itself.
- Globe Duel is two children on one device, ten places, alternating turns, one tap each. Nothing is saved from a duel — no stickers, no rank, no high score — because two players sharing one save slot shouldn't distort either child's progress.
- Where in the World? is the thinking game: three clues arrive one at a time — the continent, then something the country is known for, then a fact that names it outright — and they tap the country on the globe. Solving it on the first clue is worth the most, and the third clue means nobody ever gets stuck. It rewards deduction rather than memory.
- Flag Hunt shows a flag and asks them to find the country it belongs to — the association worth learning, rather than flag-to-name memorisation. Every flag is drawn in the page itself, because Windows has no flag emoji and would otherwise show the letters "FR" instead of the French flag. Collected countries also wear their flag in the sticker book, and every country's fact card now shows it.
- Flight Path shows a six-stop route around the world before take-off and asks them to fly it in order, drawing the real curved flight path between stops as they go. It's the only mode that teaches where places are in relation to each other rather than one at a time.
- Treasure Hunt needs no reading at all. A treasure is hidden somewhere on Earth and every dig answers only "boiling" or "freezing", with each hole left on the globe in its colour. Eight digs per treasure, no clock and no way to lose — the youngest players can do this one on their own.
- Rocket Rush is a one-minute-ish arcade run: one shared clock, every place found buys a few more seconds, and it ends the moment the clock does. Great for a quick go, and it keeps its own "most places found" record.
- Tricky Places is the one mode that asks nothing new. The game quietly remembers how every place actually went — found first time, fought for, timed out, skipped — and this mode builds a round out of the ones your child keeps losing, plus any they got right once and haven't seen for weeks. Find one cleanly twice and it retires from the rotation; a place missed over and over takes more clean finds than that to earn its way out, which is the point. It stays locked until there's enough history to be honest about, and because the record is per child, no two players get the same round.
- Power-ups (❄️ freeze the clock, 🧭 a hint, ⏭️ skip) are earned by answering three in a row, so a stuck child has something to spend rather than a wall to hit.
- Explorer ranks. Every correct answer earns XP towards a rank — Stowaway up to Legend — that carries across all modes and never goes down, so a bad run still moves them forward.
- A sticker for all 60 places, kept in a sticker book they can browse and re-read the facts from. A collected sticker is also ringed by how well it's known — gold for found cleanly twice over, dashed red for one still being missed — so the book shows what's actually stuck, not just what's been visited once.
- Explore Mode is a free-play globe: tap anything, hear a fact. Lovely for reading together.
- Screen-time friendly. Rounds are ~2 minutes, with a natural stopping point at each level.
Controls: drag to spin, scroll or pinch to zoom, tap a place to answer.
Borders and coastlines come from Natural Earth (1:110m, public domain),
so the map is real geography — a tap counts when it lands inside the country's actual borders.