Feature Rounds, Explained

Two campaign rounds, Rivers & Lakes and Deserts, Seas & Summits, don't ask for a point on the map. They ask for a thing: the Nile, the Sahara, the Andes. Pinning a 6,650 km river the way you'd pin a city would be absurd, so these rounds play by a different rule.

The rule

Your distance is measured to the nearest point of the feature itself: its real geometry, not a single marker. Click anywhere along the Yangtze's actual course and you score 0 km: a direct hit. Click inside the Sahara's real boundary? Same. Miss, and your distance is to the closest bank, shoreline, or edge, not to some arbitrary center point.

When the answer is revealed, the whole feature lights up in teal on the globe, so you can see exactly what counted; for a perfect feature hit the camera frames the whole river or desert rather than drawing a miss arc.

Bigger targets pay less

A hit is still a hit, but the distance points scale down with how much ground the target covers, because pinning a continent-sized desert is a lot easier than pinning a lake. A river counts only for its narrow ribbon of water, not its length, so even the longest pay close to full. Land on a small feature and you take the full 4,000 distance points; land on a giant one and you take about half. Some rough values, before the speed bonus:

• Lake Titicaca, the Pyrenees, and any river, the Nile included (compact, or a ribbon of water): about 3,800 to 4,000.
• The Karakoram, the Alps, the Caucasus (mid): about 3,550 to 3,800.
• The Black Sea, the Himalayas, the Mediterranean (large): about 2,500 to 3,150.
• The Sahara, the Andes, the Arabian Sea (vast): about 2,000 to 2,200, the floor.

The discount only applies when you land on the feature. Miss a big one and it fades away with distance, gone entirely by 1,000 km, so a wide miss on the Andes is scored like a wide miss on anything else.

So the feature rounds are no longer free points. They reward knowing your target precisely enough to answer fast (the speed bonus is not scaled) and favour the smaller, harder features over the giants.

Many straits are features too

About half of the final round's straits and channels work the same way: the answer is the waterway itself, so a pin anywhere on the Strait of Gibraltar or the Bosphorus measures 0 km, and the small ones pay full marks. The rest (every canal and land pass, plus straits the source atlas does not map, like Hormuz, Dover and the Bering Strait) are precise point targets, where the 30 km bullseye is your friend.

Where the shapes come from

Feature geometries are derived from Natural Earth, the public-domain cartography dataset, simplified for the game and verified against reference points (cities that must sit on their rivers, summits that must fall inside their ranges) before they ship. Rivers include their major named stretches: the Yangtze counts the Jinsha, the Danube answers to Donau.

Strategy

Features are forgiving targets if you think in shapes, not points, but the size handicap means a lazy stab at a giant desert scores less than a confident hit on a river. Rivers reward knowing one fixed anchor: a city you're sure of. Know that Cairo sits on the Nile or Vienna on the Danube, click there, and the river rule does the rest. For deserts and seas, aim for the middle of your mental blob, not its edge: the interior is all zero. Ranges run long and thin: get the orientation right (the Andes hug the coast; the Himalaya arc east-west) and click the spine.

The speed bonus still applies, so a decisive click on a known anchor beats a slow crawl along the whole feature every time. The formulas are in the scoring guide.