Landmark of the Day is a free daily geography puzzle on bematrx.com. Every day there's a new historic place, and you get six guesses to work out which of BeMatrx's 90 cities it's in. You don't need an account or the app, only the puzzle page.
How a day's puzzle works
A new landmark opens every day at 00:00 UTC. Everyone who opens the page on the same UTC day is looking for the same place, under the same puzzle number. The page also shows when the next one opens, in your own time.
You start with one clue. The clues go from hard to easy, and in each of them the names of cities and countries, and the name of the place itself, are covered by a dark bar. The bar is always the same length, so it won't tell you how long the hidden name is.
To guess, you pick a city from the list of 90. The search box takes a city or a country, so typing a country brings up every city it has on the list. You can't pick the same city twice.
What a wrong guess tells you
A wrong guess still gets you something. It opens the next clue, and it shows how far the landmark is from the city you picked, in kilometres as the crow flies, with an arrow for the direction. The arrow has eight positions: north, northeast, east, and so on round the compass.
You have six guesses at most. When you find the city, or when the sixth guess misses too, the page shows the answer: the name of the landmark, its city and country, and a link to that city's page on the site.
Since there's no sign-in, your guesses are kept in the browser you played in. You can close the tab and come back later that day without losing them, but on a different device the puzzle starts from the beginning.
Sharing a result without spoilers
At the end you get a one-line result you can copy, or share straight from the page if your browser supports it. It looks like this:
BeMatrx Landmark of the Day #12 · 3/6 ■■■□□□
Filled squares are guesses you used, empty ones are guesses you had left. If you didn't find the place, the score shows X instead of a number. Under the line there's a link to bematrx.com/anit, and that's all it carries. There's no city in it, no distance and no direction, so a friend who hasn't played yet can read it safely.
How to get better at it
Most of the skill is in reading the distance and the arrow together. The distance draws a circle around the city you guessed, and the arrow tells you which part of that circle to look at. Two wrong guesses from different sides usually leave only a small area where both fit.
The first clue is the hardest, and often you can't place it at all. That's fine, because your first guess is mostly a measurement. A city near the middle of the region you suspect gives you a useful arrow whichever way the answer lies. A city on the far edge of the map tends to come back pointing toward the middle, which you probably knew already.
Over long distances the arrow follows the start of the shortest route across the globe, not a straight line on a flat map. From London, for example, Los Angeles comes out as northwest, even though it lies well to the south of London. In the northern half of the world, long east-west arrows tend to point further north than a flat map would make you expect.
It also helps to know the list. Africa has one city on it, Cairo. The United States has six. Germany has four, the same as Türkiye and the United Kingdom. So once the arrows close in on a country, there may still be several cities in it to choose between. Type the country into the search box and you'll see them all.
Read each clue for what's left in it. Only the place's own name and the names of cities and countries are hidden, so a century, a building material, a river or the name of a ruler can stay in the text. Any of those can point you to a region before the distance does. And because every wrong guess opens an easier clue, a guess you're unsure about isn't wasted. If you're stuck between two cities, the next clue may settle it.
The same 90 cities as the app
The cities in the list are the cities of BeMatrx, a life sim app with 90 cities in 54 countries. In the app you choose one of them as the place you live, and every city has a landmark of its own, such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris. A new character starts out standing at their city's landmark, and one of the first steps in the guide is learning the story behind it. You can read more in Exploring cities in BeMatrx.
The puzzle works on its own, and you can play it every day without ever installing anything. If you'd like to see one of these cities from the inside, BeMatrx is free on the App Store and Google Play, and you can get it here. What living there is like is in A Life Sim You Share With Other Players.
