Field notes

A love letter to maps, one a day.

Map Porn is a daily map puzzle for people who already screenshot every gorgeous map they scroll past. One striking map a day, with its title and labels stripped off. You read the shape, the colors, the pattern, and name what it shows. Then the full map develops and you learn one true thing you did not know.

Everyone on Earth gets the same map on the same day. That is the whole point. It is a small shared ritual, not an endless feed. You play it, you post a spoiler-free grid, you come back tomorrow.

Licensing, because the cartographers deserve it

Every map is openly licensed or self generated from open data, and its source and license appear on the reveal screen. Country outlines and the world basemaps are built from Natural Earth, which is in the public domain. Choropleths are computed from open datasets, credited on the day they run. No map ships without a recorded license.

How it is built

The whole thing runs on Cloudflare's free tier: static pages on the edge, the day's answer held server-side and revealed only after you finish, and share images rendered at the edge. It is designed to cost effectively nothing at real scale, so it can stay free forever, with no signup and no ads over the map.

The one rule

Every decision comes back to one question. Does this make the daily map more of a ritual worth returning to? If not, it does not get built.

Go read today's map

How to play

  1. The map

    One striking map a day, with its title, legend and labels stripped away. Read the shape, the colors, the pattern.

  2. The guess

    Name what it shows. Every wrong guess sharpens the map and tells you if you are warm: right continent, right theme, right era.

  3. The reveal

    Solve it or run out of guesses, and the full map develops. Title, source, and one true thing you did not know.

  4. The grid

    Share a spoiler-free grid. It gives nothing away, so your friends have to play the same map to know what it was.

One map. Everyone, everywhere, the same one. New map at midnight UTC.