Geography game
A face appears. You decide where on Earth they came into the world. HistopinGEO is a free geography guessing game built on 150,000+ real historical figures across 198 countries. Five rounds, one map, every figure real.
Each round shows a real historical figure — a name, a portrait, and sometimes a hint about their field or era. You drop a pin anywhere on the world map where you think they were born. Land within 50km of the real birthplace and you get the full 5,000 points: a deliberately generous bullseye, since many historical figures are only recorded to the nearest town or region rather than an exact address. Beyond that, your score decays smoothly with distance — a guess a few hundred kilometers off still earns solid points, while one on the wrong continent earns very little. Five rounds per game, and your total across all five is your final score.
Most geography guessing games show a street-level photo and ask where it was taken. HistopinGEO asks a different question: where did history actually happen, one person at a time? Rulers, scientists, athletes, musicians, and revolutionaries were all born somewhere real, and the game turns that fact into something you can test yourself against round by round. Play enough of them and patterns start to surface on their own — how tightly clustered European royalty is around a handful of dynasties, how differently the map of modern sport reads from the map of ancient history, how many of a given era's most consequential figures turn out to have been born within a few hundred kilometers of each other.
Every figure, birth date, and birthplace comes from Wikidata, the open, structured knowledge base behind Wikipedia, released under a public-domain license. Portrait images come from Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, each carrying its own original uploader's license. Full sourcing and licensing detail is on the Data Sources & Attribution page.
Beyond the full 150,000-figure pool, HistopinGEO has dozens of narrower maps: single countries, historical eras, fields like science or music, and collections built entirely by other players — a list of cricketers, a roster of medieval Islamic scientists, the companions of the Prophet Muhammad. Anyone can build and publish their own map from any figures in the database.