Aimuth
Which way is Reykjavík? Point and find out.
A geography game that asks for a direction instead of a dot on a map. Aimuth names a real place, you turn your body and aim the top edge of your phone, and it scores you against the true great-circle bearing from where you are standing.
No accounts, no ads, no analytics. Nothing you do leaves your phone.
Point, lock in, score
Standard rules are 5 rounds and 10 seconds an aim.
The match takes your position
Aimuth reads your location from GPS once, when the match starts, and reuses that single reading for every turn. It is the origin every bearing is measured from, and it never leaves the phone.
A place is named
Each turn draws one target from the pack you chose — a world capital, a famous city, or a built or natural landmark.
You turn and lock in
Point the top edge of the phone and press Lock In Guess before the clock runs out. A clock that runs out scores zero: a rough aim you locked in always beats a perfect one you didn't.
How a guess is scored
Within 5° of the true bearing is a bullseye — the full 100 points. Past that the score falls in a straight line to zero at 90° off, so 30° out is 67 points. Your match score is the sum of your turns.
Points never scale with difficulty, so any two scores are comparable; harder settings pay in coins instead. Targets closer than 50 km are never drawn, so walking around mid-match cannot move the answer.
The compass work
A bearing is only as good as the heading it is measured from. Most of the engineering in Aimuth is spent there.
Smoothing that adapts
Heading comes from device motion, magnetometer and accelerometer, sampled up to ~120×/second. A 1€ filter clamps down when you hold still, so the dial doesn't twitch, and opens wide mid-swing so it doesn't lag — roughly 3° behind at 100°/s.
True north, not magnetic
Phone compasses point at magnetic north. Aimuth resolves the local magnetic declination and scores against true north. That is why its reading can differ by a few degrees from a plain compass app — and why the corrected one is the right one.
Great-circle bearings
The bearing is a great circle, not a line drawn on a flat map. Long-distance targets read far more northerly than a world map suggests, for the same reason long-haul flight paths bend towards the pole.
It notices a bent compass
A magnetic case, a MagSafe puck or a car mount skews the magnetometer. Aimuth detects the low-confidence reading and asks for a figure-8 wave before the match starts, rather than quietly scoring you against a bad heading.
Everything ships in the app
All three target packs are bundled and playable offline. There is no content download and no server that can be down.
Three target packs
- Capitals — 195 world capitalsFree
- Cities — 340 famous cities, no capitals among themCoins
- Landmarks — 100 built and natural sitesCoins
Four complete themes
Each one restyles the dial, the palette and the typography. The last three unlock with coins.
- Aimuth · default
- Pink Lady
- Dial-Up
- Cyberpunk
Two ways to play
- Single player — scored, banks your statistics and pays coins.
- Pass-and-play — up to 10 players on one phone, taking turns. It pays no coins, because a shared phone has no one player to credit.
Coins are earned, never bought
Match score ÷ 10 times a difficulty bonus, plus 3 per bullseye, plus 10 for the day's first single-player match if it contains a bullseye.
- There is no in-app purchase and no real money anywhere in the app. Coins cannot be bought.
- A shorter clock, a tighter bullseye band, a hidden country or a hidden heading number all raise the payout. More rounds do not.
What it looks like
Nothing you do in Aimuth leaves your phone
There is no account to make and no server to talk to. The target packs ship inside the app and every score is worked out on the device.
- No accounts
- No ads
- No analytics, no trackers
- Gameplay is fully offline
- Nothing you do in the game is transmitted anywhere
- Your scores and settings stay on your phone
Your player name, statistics, streaks, coin balance and unlocks are written to the app's private storage on your own device, and they are deleted when you uninstall. Location and compass readings are used to work out the turn you are playing and then discarded.
Read the full privacy policyMade by one person
Aimuth is published under the name YDev. It is an independent, one-person project.
The dial, the filtering, the three target packs and the four themes are all built and maintained by one developer, which means a bug report goes straight to the person who wrote the code. aimuth.dev@protonmail.com