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Geo Facts Challenge

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The community is toiling to build an impressive array of games for this contest. The submission period ends June 10, 2025 12:00 AM.

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Contest start date: March 3, 2025 6:08 PM

How many of us only know where Winnipeg is because we played Ticket to Ride, or Kinshasa because of Pandemic, or Kamchatka because of Risk? None of these games are educational in nature, per se, and yet for many gamers, they have been more effective teachers of geography than a textbook.

Your goal for the GeoFacts Challenge is to design a game with memorable geographical information, whether it be countries or capitals, volcanoes or valleys, or annual caribou migration corridors. The game should use modern mechanics and a printed map with real location names. Both the map and the geographical information should be integrated into game play, but this contest is about fun - don't disguise homework assignments as games!

While geography facts are essential to the GeoFacts Challenge, this contest is not about trivia or memory recall. Whatever geographical information you choose to incorporate, players who have a greater factual knowledge of the topic should not have an advantage over players with lesser knowledge.

Examples of strategic games that use a well-integrated map with memorable locations: Twilight Struggle, Sun Tzu (2005), Italian Rails, Axis and Allies, Pandemic, Risk, Terraforming Mars, the Ticket to Ride series, and certain cases in Sherlock Holmes Consulting Detective. While most of these games use a map of the world or a map of a specific country, contestants are not limited to maps of this nature.

Note that we're not looking for games with primarily decorative location names (as in Power Grid) - a good litmus test would be to ask yourself if a person could play your game five times without learning the geography facts in your game. If so, your geo facts may not be well-integrated. Also note that geography facts should be specific tidbits of info rather than general vocabulary words (the mountains/hills/plains regions in Barrage would be too generic for this contest).

The artwork and theme for all games must be appropriate for ages 12 and up.


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