What is Route Builder?
Route Builder is a free daily geography game. Every day at midnight UTC, everyone in the world gets the same five cities, pinned on the map. Your job is the world's smallest travelling-salesman problem: click the pins in the order that makes the shortest possible round trip — visiting every city once and ending back where you started.
Five stops sounds easy, but there are 24 possible orders and only one is the best. The eye is easily fooled: the nearest city is not always the right next stop, and a route that looks tidy on a flat map can hide a huge detour once you remember distances curve over the surface of the Earth. When you lock your route in, the optimal one is drawn right over yours — every wasted kilometer, exposed.
How points work
Your score compares your round trip against the shortest one — and it punishes detours hard.
- 🟩 The optimal route — exactly 1000 points, and nothing else gets there
- 🟨 10% longer — about 751 points
- 🟥 30% longer — about 455 points
All distances are great-circle ("as the crow flies") — the shortest path over the surface of the Earth between each pair of cities.
The legs of your route use the same distance math behind MapGO's Point to Point tool, which measures the great-circle distance between any two points on Earth. Sign in free to save your score, build a streak, and appear on the daily and all-time leaderboards.