How Scoring Works

Every question in Miles Off is worth up to 6,000 points, split into two parts: how close your pin lands, and how fast you place it. Nothing is hidden and there is no randomness: the same guess at the same speed always scores the same.

Distance points · up to 4,000

Land within 30 km of the answer and you take the full 4,000: that's a Bullseye, and the game treats everything inside that circle as perfect. Beyond 30 km, points fall off fast: the distance score halves every 450 km, so about half is gone by 450 km, three quarters by 900, and past 1,800 km you're collecting crumbs. The curve is kind to near misses and brutal to wrong continents, which is the whole game, really.

Speed bonus · up to 2,000

You have ten seconds per place. The speed bonus scales linearly with the time you leave on the clock: answer instantly for the full 2,000, answer at the buzzer for zero. A confident wrong answer is still wrong (speed multiplies nothing, it's added), so the bonus rewards knowing, not gambling faster.

Feature rounds measure differently

For rivers, lakes, deserts, seas and mountain ranges, distance is measured to the nearest point of the feature itself: a pin anywhere on the Amazon is 0 km. But a hit is worth less on a bigger target: the distance points scale down with the feature's size, so nailing a small lake pays full marks while landing somewhere in the Sahara pays about half. The full rules live in the feature rounds guide.

Harder places are worth more

Not every place is worth the same. Each carries a difficulty weight set by how little-known it is (measured from real Wikipedia readership) and, for features, how big it is: a small, obscure target can be worth roughly double a famous, easy one. So nailing Naypyidaw counts for far more than nailing Paris, and your Explorer IQ reflects the hard places you got right rather than the easy ones you padded. (See the hardest countries for the worst offenders.)

Surviving a round

A campaign round asks six places, and the bar to advance is a share of what that round is actually worth: about 40 per cent of a perfect round early on (roughly 12,100 points in round one), climbing to nearly 60 per cent by the finale (around 23,700). Speed alone can never clear a round; the deep rounds demand real accuracy on genuinely hard places. Fall short and the expedition ends there.

Explorer IQ

At the end of a run, your total is mapped onto an IQ-style scale from 70 (you never left port) to 200 (a near-perfect run through all twelve rounds): 70 + 130 × (your points ÷ the maximum possible). The scale is linear: every point you score anywhere in the run moves it. Rank titles run from Lost Tourist up to Master Cartographer at 185+.

The Daily Challenge counts differently

Dailies are five places with the same formulas, but scores are recomputed on the server from your raw pins before they touch a leaderboard; the client never gets to claim a number. Details in the Daily Challenge guide.

A worked example

Say a round throws you six places. You pin the first 20 km out with six seconds left: inside the 30 km bullseye, so the full 4,000 for distance plus 1,200 for speed, 5,200. The next you nail to 25 km with eight seconds: another bullseye, 4,000 plus 1,600, 5,600. Then a shaky one lands 600 km off with four seconds left: the sharper curve has more than halved it to about 1,600, plus 800, so 2,400. Three middling answers around 2,500 add 7,500, bringing the round to roughly 20,700, comfortably past the first round's 12,100 bar (later rounds ask more). String runs like that together and you land in the 140s on the Explorer IQ scale, which now tops out at 200 for a near-perfect expedition. The lesson the maths keeps teaching: two clean bullseyes cover a lot of sins, and one wrong continent is almost impossible to buy back.