I am personally a huge fun of geography games and I am playing regularly https://www.geoguessr.com and https://guesswhereyouare.com, so this iNatGuessr version is such a great addition. I wanted to ask however if there is a plan to continue develop the iNatGuessr, add multiplayer options and leaderboards?
Wow this is a brilliant game. At first I was a little unhappy with the selection of taxons, but then I noticed that it’s done by URL and that I can just put an iNat taxon number and it works, so we are now doing vertebrates, which looks like the most fun for us. We usually get it to the right part of the world, but under 500 kms is reeaaaaally hard.
Played for a couple hours with my brother just yesterday!! My brother is a serious geoguessr player, so he brings the “that looks like Olklahoma concrete” skills, and I bring the naturalist skills! My favorite part is that it tells you the scientific name of each species once you make your guess, so I get to look into all kinds of cool, beautiful creatures I’d never seen before.
I actually only discovered it this year! Got a handful of guesses that were only 4kms or so off (in my defence, the one was a gull on the Golden Gate Bridge)
I’ve been using it to practice mass US sparrow IDs lately! I’ve been getting fairly decent at figuring out regions based on which sparrows it gives me (relative to knowing nothing about sparrows before I started)
There is also a Google Street View birding facebook group, they’ve found around 1800 bird species (and a bunch of other taxa), with the latest being Southern Cassowary the other day! Nice article on it here.
I assume people play it without any sources? One could be much more precise using an atlas, but that would be cheating, right? :)
I also wonder how the locations are defined. We got some photos that we could easily locate within basically meters (from Khao Yai), but the target point was 20 kms away.
You can figure out the taxon ID of whatever taxon you want by doing a search on iNat limited to just that taxon; the iNat webpage URL will show taxon ID. You can basically add any iNat URL filters you want to the game, and it’ll work!
I limited the game to Kansas observations earlier today, and laughed when I recognized one of my own photos - made that location guess pretty easy!