What is Capitrail?
Capitrail is a daily geography game where you navigate between world capitals using a compass bearing and a distance estimate. Each round names a starting capital and a destination capital. You set a heading in degrees and guess the great-circle distance, then submit. The core mechanic: the next round begins from wherever your guess actually landed you, not from the target capital. Miss badly and round two starts at a nameless point with raw coordinates, forcing you to navigate onward from your own error.
How to play Capitrail
Set the bearing by clicking around the compass dial. It shows the degree and compass point, such as 315° NW.
Use the slider to estimate the great-circle distance. Each round gives a range from 62 mi to 12,427 mi. Adjust the value with the minus and plus buttons, or type it directly.
Tap Submit Guess. The game shows the correct bearing and distance, awards points, and tells you how far your landing point was from the target.
Start the next round from your landing point. If your guess is off, that position becomes Landing 1, then Landing 2, and so on. The game displays its coordinates.
Complete all five rounds. Your running total stays visible in the header.
The linked-round design is what makes Capitrail a stronger geography exercise than a standard distance quiz. Most guessing games reset you after each round, so mistakes carry no penalty. Capitrail makes you navigate out of your own error. Landing in the Pacific and working out a bearing to Baghdad from there teaches spatial reasoning that a correct answer never would. The compass forces you to think in degrees rather than vague map gestures, and five rounds that build on each other leave you measurably better at the skill you were practicing.
Reading the feedback
Each submission returns three verdicts. One compares the true bearing with yours: Correct 328 deg NNW versus your submitted 315 deg NW. Another compares the true distance with your estimate. The third gives you a plain-English measure of the miss, such as Wide with Guessed point was 10,228 mi off target. Your score for the round appears at the top, while the running total stays in the header, showing what the trail has cost you so far.
Tips for better navigation
Use the stated distance range as a clue. If the slider bottoms out at 62 mi, the game is telling you that nothing on this trail is a short hop. The upper bound is roughly half the earth's circumference, not a realistic candidate.
Bearing matters more than it first appears. A guess can be close in distance but 70 degrees off in direction, putting you on the wrong continent and shaping your starting point for the next round.
Remember that the bearing is a great-circle heading, not the direction you would draw on a flat map. From Singapore, Kathmandu lies NNW, not due north as a mental Mercator projection might suggest.
When you land somewhere absurd, read the coordinates instead of guessing blindly. Knowing you are at 1.3°, 103.8° places you near the equator, which sharply narrows the possibilities for the next bearing.
Modes
Daily trail runs five linked rounds with the same capital targets for everyone that day. Your landing points are unique to you, so no two trails look identical.
Replay lets you run the same day's trail again from the results screen once you have finished.