Daily Brains · see the view, read the contours, find where you are standing.
Lie of the Land is the map-reading puzzle in Daily Brains (/daily). Each day brings three contour maps. On each one you are dropped somewhere on the hill and shown what you see, a first-person 3D view with a compass heading, plus four marked spots, A to D. Read the ridges, valleys, summits and cols off the contour lines, match them to the view, and pick the spot you are standing on. Sunday is Field Day: instead of a view you get a situation (a gale, a downpour, a thunderstorm, a sightline, a spring, a frost) and pick the best spot for it.
STORY & LORE
Real ground, made fresh
Every map is a new piece of hill country built from the puzzle number, so the whole world gets the same three maps on the same day. The terrain is a sum of domain-warped hills, ridges, valleys and the odd closed hollow, plus a little noise. The map draws it the way a walker's map would: brown contours every 10 m, every fifth one thick and labelled with its numbers reading uphill, tick marks pointing into closed hollows, spot heights on the tops, soft hillshade from the north-west, a 200 m grid, a scale bar and a north arrow.
Fair by construction
For a 'where are you standing' map the generator looks at the view from the hidden spot as a coarse depth image, then scans the view from every candidate decoy at the same heading. A decoy is only used when its view is clearly different (a depth-image dissimilarity floor that tightens through the week) and different in a way you can name: the ground ahead rises instead of falls, the high ground is on the other side, a hillside fills the middle of the view, or you would be noticeably higher or lower. Early in the week a height difference alone is never enough. Field Day spots are judged by physical rules on the terrain (shelter angle to windward, slope, flow accumulation, closed-depression depth, elevation percentile, line-of-sight raycasts), and exactly one spot passes. A test re-checks 400 days of maps from scratch.
HOW IT PLAYS
Where are you standing? (Monday to Saturday)
The view shows what you would see standing at the hidden spot, eye height 1.7 m, facing the stated compass heading (the strip across the top of the view is a compass). Tap a letter or a pin on the map, then Lock in. After you answer, the map draws your field of view from the right spot, and you can tap any letter to see the view from there and read why it does not match. Difficulty rises through the week: Monday lets you drag to look all the way round and keeps the decoys well apart; Tuesday and Wednesday allow a smaller turn; from Thursday the view is fixed, the decoys sit closer and on similar ground, headings come in 16 compass points, and on Friday and Saturday the map is turned so north is no longer up.
Field Day (Sunday)
Three of six situations, rotating so each comes round every fortnight. Gale camp: shelter in the lee of higher ground on gentle slopes; tops, cols and windward slopes take the full force, and steep ground has nowhere to pitch. Rain camp: a gentle shoulder that sheds water; drainage lines (contours making a V pointing uphill), valley floors and hollows fill up. Lightning: low, gentle ground off the skyline, away from summits, ridge crests, cols and lone trees. Line of sight: the one spot whose sightline to the cairn clears every rise. Where the water goes: follow the spring downhill across the contours; not up side valleys, not over a spur, never uphill. Frost hollow: cold air drains downhill on a still night and pools in the bottom of a closed hollow. The reveal draws the wind, the streams, the strike zone, the sightlines or the pooled cold air on the map. A small 3D block model with the four pins sits above the map; drag it to turn it.
Scoring, streaks and sharing
300 points for each map you get right, plus 100 for all three, so the day is out of 1000. Two right out of three wins the day and keeps the streak. Progress saves on every answer and follows your account. The share text lists each map as a hit or a miss with no spoilers.
GALLERY
THE WEEK
| Day | What changes |
|---|---|
| Monday | Free look-around, decoys at least 230 m away, 8-point headings |
| Tuesday | Turn 60 degrees each way |
| Wednesday | Turn 30 degrees each way |
| Thursday | Fixed view, 16-point headings, decoys on similar ground |
| Friday | Fixed view, map turned (north not up) |
| Saturday | Hardest views: closest decoys, map turned |
| Sunday | Field Day: three weather and terrain situations |
REWARDS
| Event | Reward |
|---|---|
| Win the day (two of three right) | 15 Tickets |
| All three right | +25 Tickets |
| Found Yourself (first win) | Bronze · 10 Tickets |
| Three for Three | Silver · 20 Tickets |
| Weekend Rambler (3-day streak) | Bronze · 15 Tickets |
| Fell Walker (7-day streak) | Gold · 40 Tickets |
| Surveyor General (30-day streak) | Legendary · 100 Tickets |
| Lee Side, Dry Feet, Low Profile, Eagle Eye, Watershed, Frost Finder (each Field Day situation) | Bronze · 5 Tickets each |
| Field Marshal (perfect Sunday) | Gold · 25 Tickets |
| Fixed Gaze (perfect Saturday) | Gold · 25 Tickets |
| True North (secret) | Silver · 20 Tickets |
VERSION HISTORY
- Launch version in Daily Brains.
- Procedural contour maps (10 m contours, labelled index contours, depression ticks, hillshade, spot heights) and a voxel-space 3D renderer for the first-person view and the Field Day block model.
- Three 'where are you standing' maps a day, Monday to Saturday, with decoys chosen by view dissimilarity plus a nameable difference; Sunday Field Day with six physically judged situations.
- Rules deck with drawn sketches; no emoji anywhere; centred header, controls and reveal panel; 400-day generator test in CI.