The Lakes Quiz

Inland seas and Great Lakes. Land on the water, anywhere on it. This pack draws from 24 real places, and the quiz is not multiple choice: you get an unlabelled 3D globe, the name of a place, and 10 seconds to pin where it is. Points scale with how close you land and how fast you commit, so a near miss beats a wild stab and knowing beats guessing.

A lake is a polygon, and the feature rule is the whole game

This pack is feature-scored: a pin anywhere inside the drawn boundary of a lake measures zero kilometres, so the first reward is knowing the lake at all. The second is knowing how big it is, because the scoring scales the points down by the lake's extent. Lake Superior, one of the largest freshwater bodies on Earth at over six hundred kilometres across, pays less than a compact lake like Titicaca or Vänern. So the famous lakes are not the generous ones; the small ones are, and the pack quietly separates the player who knows the name from the one who knows the size.

The feature rule also means the pin goes on the water, not on a city at the shore. A click on Chicago for a Lake Michigan clue scores the distance from Chicago to the nearest point of the polygon, which may be thirty kilometres, so the habit to build is pushing the pin into the interior of the drawn shape, not onto a familiar coast.

Three habits that convert names into pins

Sort the Great Lakes. Lake Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie and Ontario sit on the US-Canada border between roughly 41 and 48 degrees north. They are the densest cluster in the pack, and they are not interchangeable. Superior is the largest and northernmost; Michigan is the one wholly in the USA; Erie sits south of the others; Ontario is the smallest and easternmost. A pin on Superior for an Erie clue is a five-hundred-kilometre miss, so the habit is asking which Great Lake a clue names before you commit.

Use the East African Rift. Lake Victoria, Tanganyika, Malawi and Turkana sit in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa, between roughly 3 degrees south and 5 degrees north. They share a tropical latitude and a tectonic setting, so if a clue names an African rift lake, the pin belongs in the equatorial highlands, not on the coast. Victoria is the largest, on the Kenya-Uganda-Tanzania border; Tanganyika is the deep one to the south; Malawi runs further south still; Turkana sits in the arid north of Kenya.

Place the singletons by their country. Lake Baikal sits in Siberian Russia at about 53 degrees north; it is the deepest lake in the world and sits in a rift valley north of Mongolia. Lake Titicaca sits on the Peru-Bolivia border at about 15 degrees south, high in the Andes. Lake Ladoga and Onega sit in northwestern Russia, near Saint Petersburg. Lake Eyre sits in the South Australian desert and is usually a salt flat. Lake Chad sits in the Sahel at about 13 degrees north. Issyk-Kul sits in the Tien Shan of Kyrgyzstan. Each is the only lake in its region, so knowing the country pins it.

What makes a lakes run hard

The pack's 24 places include genuine confusables. The Great Slave Lake and Great Bear Lake both sit in Canada's Northwest Territories, but Great Bear is the northern one, above the Arctic Circle, while Great Slave sits further south near Yellowknife. Lake Winnipeg and Lake Athabasca are both in Canada, hundreds of kilometres apart. Lake Vänern and Lake Van sound alike but sit a continent apart, Vänern in Sweden and Van in Türkiye. The discipline this pack builds is pairing the lake with its basin: the Great Lakes are North America, the rift lakes are equatorial Africa, the Siberian lakes are Russia. For how the feature rule prices a lake by its size, the feature rounds guide covers the scoring. For the latitude habit that sorts equatorial from boreal, Latitude Tells explains how climate constrains where lakes can even sit.

How a run works

A run is 10 places sampled fresh from the pack each time, timed, and scored server-side onto the pack's own leaderboard. Your best run stands as your entry, and you can grind it down (or up) as long as you like. Free accounts get one ranked run a day; premium is unlimited.

Places you might be asked to pin

• Great Bear Lake · Canada
• Great Slave Lake · Canada
• Issyk-Kul · Kyrgyzstan
• Lake Athabasca · Canada
• Lake Baikal · Siberia, Russia
• Lake Balkhash · Kazakhstan
• Lake Chad · Central Africa
• Lake Erie · USA / Canada
• Lake Eyre · Australia
• Lake Huron · USA / Canada

…and 14 more across the pack.

More terrain & water

• The Rivers quiz · Trace the great rivers. A pin anywhere along the water counts.
• The Deserts quiz · The great sand seas and their edges. Anywhere inside counts.
• The Seas & Oceans quiz · Open water, gulfs and bays. Pin anywhere on the sea.

All packs & their leaderboards ▸