UK Map Game
Interactive UK geography game with live rail departures — guess a hidden location using radius, temperature, and region clues
Work in progress — playable but actively being built.
What It Is
An interactive UK map with two modes:
- Station Board — pick any of 2,800 UK rail stations and browse live timetable departures, filtered by operator (tube lines shown with their official line colours)
- Geography Game — narrow down a hidden location on the UK map using clues
The Game
Each round you’re given a series of clues and must eliminate regions until only one remains. Four clue types:
Radius — “The location is within / outside X km of [place]“
A circle expands or contracts the valid zone.
Temperature — “The location is warmer / cooler than [point A] relative to [point B]“
Draws the perpendicular bisector of A→B. Everything on B’s side is hotter. The bisector is computed in real geographic space (accounting for cos(lat) so it’s actually perpendicular, not skewed by the Mercator projection).
Region — “The location is in the same county / borough / country as [place]“
Shades the matched administrative boundary.
Distance — “The location is closer / further from [landmark] than [reference point]“
Draws a circle centred on the landmark at the exact distance from the reference point.
The Data
The timetable is built from two sources merged into PostgreSQL:
- National Rail — CIF timetable files, ~25k services
- London Underground — TfL Open Data API for all 11 lines (Bakerloo, Central, Circle, District, Hammersmith & City, Jubilee, Metropolitan, Northern, Piccadilly, Victoria, Waterloo & City)
Merging them required deduplicating ~50 stations that exist in both datasets (e.g. Paddington, Waterloo, King’s Cross St. Pancras) using proximity matching and name normalisation.
Stack
| Layer | Tech |
|---|---|
| Frontend | React + Leaflet + Tailwind, built with Vite |
| API | Express + pg, running on Render |
| Database | PostgreSQL on Render (~466k service stops) |
| Routing | Cloudflare Worker proxies /map-game/api/* → Render, /map-game/* → Cloudflare Pages |
| Map tiles | OpenStreetMap |
What’s Next
- Multiplayer / competitive mode
- Scoring system
- More clue types
- Mobile layout