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Category Challenge · Terrain & water

The Deserts Quiz

The great sand seas and their edges. Anywhere inside counts. This pack draws from 16 real places, and the quiz is not multiple choice: you get an unlabelled 3D globe, the name of a place, and 10 seconds to pin where it is. Points scale with how close you land and how fast you commit, so a near miss beats a wild stab and knowing beats guessing.

A desert is a polygon, and its size is your handicap

This pack is feature-scored: a pin anywhere inside the drawn boundary of a desert measures zero kilometres, so the first reward is knowing the desert at all. The second is knowing how big it is, because the scoring scales the points down by the desert's extent. The Sahara, the largest hot desert on Earth at over six thousand kilometres across, pays about half even for a correct hit. The Sonoran or the Namib, comparatively compact, pay nearly full marks. So the famous deserts are not the generous ones; the small ones are, and the pack quietly separates the player who knows the name from the one who knows the size.

The feature rule also means the pin goes on the sand, not on a city at the edge. A click on Cairo for a Sahara clue scores the distance from Cairo to the nearest point of the polygon, which may be two hundred kilometres, so the habit to build is pushing the pin into the interior of the drawn shape, not onto a familiar coast.

Three habits that convert names into pins

Follow the latitude band. Most great deserts sit in the subtropical dry belt, between roughly 15 and 35 degrees north or south, where the descending air of the Hadley cells strips out the rain. The Sahara, the Arabian Peninsula's Rub'al Khali, the Thar, the Karakum and the Kyzylkum all sit in the northern belt. The Kalahari and the Namib sit in the southern belt. If a clue names a desert you cannot place, the subtropical band is the safest latitude, and the hemisphere is the next question.

Use the continental edge. Several deserts sit on the western coast of a continent, where cold ocean currents suppress rain. The Atacama runs along the Pacific coast of South America, the Namib along the Atlantic coast of southern Africa, and the western edge of the Sahara sits on the Atlantic near Mauritania. If a clue is coastal and arid, a western shore is the better guess than the continental interior.

Sort the Asian interior. The Gobi, the Taklamakan, the Karakum and the Kyzylkum all sit in the dry interior of Asia, but they are not interchangeable. The Gobi straddles Mongolia and northern China; the Taklamakan sits in the Tarim Basin of western China; the Karakum is in Turkmenistan; the Kyzylkum is in Central Asia between the Amu Darya and Syr Darya. They share a latitude around 35 to 45 degrees north, so the longitude is the separator, and the habit is asking which Central Asian republic a clue belongs to.

What makes a desert run hard

The pack's 16 places include genuine confusables. The Great Victoria and the Great Sandy are both Australian, but the Great Victoria sits in the south and the Great Sandy in the northwest, so a pin on the wrong one is a thousand-kilometre miss. The Sonoran and the Chihuahuan both sit on the US-Mexico border, but the Sonoran is the western one, reaching California, and the Chihuahuan is the eastern one, reaching Texas. The Simpson and the Great Sandy are both in the Australian interior, hundreds of kilometres apart. The Syrian Desert sits on the northern edge of the Arabian block, not in the Sahara's orbit, so a "somewhere in Arabia" guess that lands too far south costs you. For how the feature rule prices a desert by its size, and why the Sahara pays half while a small desert pays full, the feature rounds guide covers the scoring in detail. For the latitude habit that sorts the subtropical belts,Latitude Tells explains how climate constrains where deserts can even form.

How a run works

A run is 10 places sampled fresh from the pack each time, timed, and scored server-side onto the pack's own leaderboard. Your best run stands as your entry, and you can grind it down (or up) as long as you like. Free accounts get one ranked run a day; premium is unlimited.

Places you might be asked to pin

  • The Atacama Desert · Chile
  • The Chihuahuan Desert · Mexico / USA
  • The Gobi Desert · Mongolia / China
  • The Great Sandy Desert · Australia
  • The Great Victoria Desert · Australia
  • The Kalahari · Southern Africa
  • The Karakum Desert · Turkmenistan
  • The Kyzylkum Desert · Central Asia
  • The Namib Desert · Namibia
  • The Rub' al Khali · Arabian Peninsula

…and 6 more across the pack.

Play the Deserts quiz

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