Geowizard – the pseudonym of Youtuber Tom Davies – was probably the guy who got me back into Geoguessr a few years back. At that time, he was one of the world leaders at playing the game, and his sense of humour really added to his entertaining offerings.

But I’ve always enjoyed his videos rather than trying to play along. And once you’ve watched the video, you know the answers, so you can’t play along. So when I realised that I had just a few minutes spare this afternoon, rather than starting his latest video, I decided to click through and play the same game, blind.

And I did OK, considering. This was a single point photosphere, so you couldn’t move. There was a Masjid in Timor L’Este, an airport in China, mountain viewpoints in Liechtenstein and Pakistan, and a mining settlement in Papua New Guinea. And I didn’t spent much time on it: only about 8 minutes in total, but came out with a very decent score of 23,499.

And with a bit more effort (and time), it could have been even better. I guessed a bit, instead of taking the time to plonk my marker down really accurately.

But it was only a couple of hours later than I actually clicked through to see how Tom had done.

16,758. Wow.
Sure, a big error on the last one in PNG, but even without that, I’d still have outscored him.

And this isn’t me being smug. Or me saying that he’s rubbish, because he’s really not.

But if you are going to try to be good at something like this game, and you start learning how to play it, then managing to achieve this sort of thing is a real milestone, and I was amazed to have done it.

I’m still some distance from learning bollards, or challenging the real stars of the game, but I am getting better.

So this was a pretty big moment, and I am well chuffed with it.