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 aim the top edge of your phone or spin the dial with a finger, and it scores you against the true bearing from where you are standing — the heading a world map would give you.
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. Or switch on a random start and be dropped in a city somewhere else in the world.
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 aim and lock in
Point the top edge of the phone, or spin the dial with your finger, 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 — and on letting you leave the compass out entirely.
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.
Bearings that match the map
The answer is the one compass heading you could hold all the way to the target — the straight line on a world map. The shortest route bends toward the pole and would tax players for their latitude; this one is fair wherever you live.
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.
Or aim with a finger
Turn on Touch to aim and drag the dial round instead of turning the phone — handy on a bus, or on a phone with no compass at all. The sensors switch off, and it scores and pays exactly the same.
Start somewhere else
A random start measures every bearing from a world city, named before the first turn. No GPS fix is taken, so it plays indoors — and with touch aim on as well, the app asks for no permissions at all.
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
Five complete themes
Each one restyles the dial, the palette and the typography. The last four unlock with coins.
- Aimuth · default
- Pink Lady
- Dial-Up
- Cyberpunk
- Monochrome
Ways to play
- Single player — scored, banks your statistics and pays coins.
- Random start — either mode, measured from a random city instead of where you are standing.
- 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 random start, or hiding the country, the heading number or the answer 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, when a match uses them, work out the turn you are playing and are 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 five 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