The Mountains & Summits Quiz

The world roof: great ranges and the peaks that crown them. This pack draws from 37 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 range is a region you pin anywhere, a summit is a point you must hit

This pack is two games at once. The great ranges, the Andes, the Himalayas, the Rockies, are feature targets: a click anywhere inside the drawn polygon measures zero kilometres, and the scoring scales the points down by how large the range is. The summits, Everest, Fuji, Kilimanjaro, are point locations: there is no feature to land on, and only a tight thirty-kilometre bullseye pays full marks. So the first question on any mountain clue is which kind of answer it wants, because the strategy is completely different.

For a range, size is the handicap. The Andes, the longest mountain range on land at over seven thousand kilometres, pays about half even for a correct hit, because its drawn extent is so vast. The Pyrenees or the Karakoram, compact ranges a few hundred kilometres across, pay nearly full marks. The famous ranges are not the generous ones; the compact ones are.

Three habits for the ranges

Follow the continental edge. Most great ranges run along a coast or a plate boundary. The Andes trace the Pacific coast of South America; the Rockies run the western spine of North America; the Cascades sit on the Pacific northwest. The Urals, the one exception people remember, run north-south through the interior of Eurasia and mark the conventional line between Europe and Asia. If the clue names a range you do not know, a coastal western edge is the safer guess than the continental interior.

Sort the Himalayan neighbours. The Himalayas, the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush sit next to each other and confuse everyone. The Himalayas run along the northern edge of the Indian subcontinent and hold the highest peaks, including Everest. The Karakoram lies to their northwest, along the border of Pakistan and China. The Hindu Kush runs west of that, across Afghanistan. A pin on the Himalayas for a Karakoram clue is a real miss, so the useful habit is asking which of the three a clue means before you commit.

Use the extent, not the fame. A range's payout falls with its size, so knowing whether a target is the Rockies or the Sierra Nevada matters as much as knowing its name. The Sierra Nevada is a single California range, compact and full-pay; the Rockies stretch the length of western North America and pay less. The Alps are central Europe and pay well; the Caucasus, between the Black and Caspian seas, are shorter still. When two ranges share a continent, the smaller one is usually the better score.

Summits are a different skill

The point summits in this pack, Everest, Fuji, Kilimanjaro, the Matterhorn, Denali, Mont Blanc, reward precise knowledge, not feature logic. There is no polygon to fall back on, so a vague "somewhere in the Alps" guess for Mont Blanc costs you the distance a range hit would have forgiven. The cheapest anchors: Fuji sits on Honshu south of Tokyo; Kilimanjaro stands in Tanzania near the equator; Cotopaxi is in Ecuador, also on the equator; Vesuvius overlooks Naples; and Table Mountain guards Cape Town. Volcanoes tend to sit on the Pacific Ring of Fire, so a volcanic summit you cannot place is safer near a Pacific coast than inland.

For how the feature rule prices a range by its size, the feature rounds guide covers the scoring in detail. For the broader skill of reading altitude and climate into where a mountain can even stand, Latitude Tells explains how position constrains the landscape.

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

• Aoraki / Mount Cook · New Zealand
• Cotopaxi · Ecuador
• Denali · Alaska, USA
• Mont Blanc · France / Italy
• Mount Bromo · Indonesia
• Mount Etna · Italy
• Mount Everest · Nepal
• Mount Fuji · Japan
• Mount Kenya · Kenya
• Mount Kilimanjaro · Tanzania

…and 27 more across the pack.

More terrain & water

• The Rivers quiz · Trace the great rivers. A pin anywhere along the water counts.
• The Lakes quiz · Inland seas and Great Lakes. Land on the water, anywhere on it.
• The Deserts quiz · The great sand seas and their edges. Anywhere inside counts.

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