A geography game that teaches what cities can do.
Smart cities make life better, greener, fairer. Here's the gist.
Smart City Scout takes the structure of Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? and replaces criminals with a much more interesting target: the quiet, ambitious urban programs reshaping life in cities around the world.
What's a "smart city" program?
We use the term loosely: anything a city is doing — with technology, policy, or pure imagination — to make daily life better. That includes Barcelona reclaiming streets from cars, Singapore wiring up a national digital ID, Medellín building cable cars into the hills, and Kigali banning plastic bags. Sensors are nice, but most great smart-city programs are really about people.
How to play
- Pick your scout level. Junior is perfect for kids 8+; Hard is for experts.
- Read each clue and travel for more — but every clue costs points.
- Click anywhere on the world map to drop a pin.
- Lock in your guess. If you're close enough, the dossier unlocks with the real program and a source link.
Roster
47 cities span Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas and Oceania. Each one has been fact-checked against a primary source — usually a city website or a peer-reviewed case study — and that source is shown in the dossier so you can verify and dig in further.
Credits
Built with TanStack Start, Tailwind CSS, and Google Maps. Type set in Fraunces, Inter and JetBrains Mono. Inspired by every city official who ever stood in front of a council and proposed something different.