Very interesting dr101 - I think if you compare our scores, which are very, very close, and our maps, which are quite different, it is reasonable to make the assumption that your single 'dead on' guess made up for your several 'way off' guesses - in contrast to mine, earning a similar score for three 'near misses' and two moderately off guesses. So, I think we can say that you get a very fat score total for a 'hole-in-one'?
Yep. Actually, I took it a second time, and did slightly better, with a different pattern.
Here are the results from the second time. The first time was clearly Polish; I had no idea where in Poland so I guessed roughly in the middle of the country and did pretty good. The second looked Appalachian but was actually the UP of Michigan; that was fairly bad. The third had French lettering, and one of the store signs said "Isere". IIRC that is a region in France, and so I made my best guess of where I thought it was and turned out to be close. The fourth I got lucky: it was distinctly Rust Belt so I guessed Central Ohio and coincidentally it was very close (that was my best guess; but it was a lot of luck: it could have been anywhere in Ohio, most of Pennsylvania, etc so I guessed Ohio as the rough middle point). The fifth was interesting: the signs had Cyrillic lettering but there was also an EU flag flying. I guessed Latvia because IIRC there are some Russian-speaking areas there, but it turned out to be Bulgaria. I had forgotten that Bulgaria was another Cyrillic area of the EU. That was my worst guess.
None of my guesses were as close as that one great guess in the first test, but my score got better because I didn't have any totally terrible guesses. So instead of one great guess, two mediocre ones, and two horrible ones, I had two very good guesses, one mediocre one, and two fairly bad ones. Interesting. This game is fun c:
