City Higher or Lower is a free daily geography game. You are shown two world cities side by side; call whether the next city has a higher or lower metropolitan population than the last, and keep the chain going for as long as you can. One wrong call ends the run.

Every day brings one shared World chain, seeded from the date so that every player worldwide gets the exact same order of cities. That makes your streak comparable with everyone else’s, and it is why the copy-to-clipboard result card is worth sharing. Miss today’s chain and a brand new one arrives at midnight UTC.

Each card shows the country’s flag alongside the city, so you always know where in the world you are. When you want more, Endless mode drops the daily limit and lets you pick a region pack – World, Europe, Asia, the Americas or Africa – and chase your best streak in each.

Play City Higher or Lower

How to play

Look at the two cities. The city on the left shows its metro population; the one on the right is hidden.
Decide whether the hidden city has a higher or lower population, then tap Higher or Lower (or use the up and down arrow keys).
Guess right and that city becomes the new baseline, the chain continues, and your streak climbs. A tie counts as correct.
Guess wrong and the run ends. The real population is revealed so you learn as you go.
Tap Share result to copy your spoiler-free emoji score, then compare with friends.

Game modes

Daily is the headline mode: one World chain per day, identical for everyone, so your streak is a fair contest. Come back each day to keep the habit and grow your best-daily record.

Endless removes the once-a-day limit. Pick a region pack and play as many fresh chains as you like:

🌍 World – every city in the game, the widest test.
🇪🇺 Europe, 🌏 Asia, 🌎 Americas and 🌍 Africa – focus on one continent and learn its cities.

Your current streak, best daily streak, games played, average streak and best endless streak per pack are all saved on your device. There is no login and nothing to install.

The geography behind it

City populations are trickier than they look. A city’s official limits can be tiny while its surrounding urban area is enormous, so this game uses metropolitan (urban agglomeration) figures – the whole built-up area – from the public-domain Natural Earth dataset. That is why Tokyo tops the list at more than 35 million people across greater Tokyo, while a compact capital can rank far lower than its fame suggests.

Playing in this metro framing surfaces the surprises that make geography fun: how India’s Mumbai, Delhi and Kolkata all crowd the top; how Cairo and Lagos anchor Africa; how a European capital you think of as huge is smaller than a manufacturing hub you have barely heard of. Over a few runs you build a genuine feel for the scale of the world’s cities.

Frequently asked questions

Is it the same chain for everyone today?

Yes. The Daily chain is seeded from the current date in UTC, so every player worldwide gets the same cities in the same order each day. The chain resets at midnight UTC. Endless mode uses fresh random chains instead.

Where do the city populations come from?

From Natural Earth, a public-domain map dataset. The number shown is the metropolitan or urban-agglomeration population (the wider built-up area), which is the figure people usually have a feel for. All data is bundled into the game, so nothing is fetched while you play.

Why metro population and not the city limits?

City-limit boundaries are drawn very differently around the world – some cities annex their whole region, others stop at a small historic core. Metro figures give a fairer, more consistent comparison, so a higher-or-lower call is about real size rather than where a line happens to be drawn.

How do the region packs work?

In Endless mode you can narrow the cities to one continent – Europe, Asia, the Americas or Africa – or play the full World pack. The Daily chain always uses the World pack so the shared puzzle is the same for everyone.

Does it work on mobile and offline?

Yes. The game is built mobile-first with large tap targets, and because every city, flag and population is bundled in, it keeps working even with a flaky connection once the page has loaded.