I'm sure most of you have played around with Google Earth--found your house, the Eiffel Tower, whatever. It's a fun and exciting pastime (or, at the very least, time-killing).
I play a Boggle-like game called Word Ferret through a browser-based puzzle site called DKM Software. Recently, I've become obsessed with their
Google Earth-based puzzle game called "Eagle Eye." Basically, you're given a target, which is a close-up satellite image of some location, and, with the help of three clues, you find it by zooming in and moving around on the Google Earth map. (Hint: On the "Target" tab is a little text field called "Distance from current position.")
The puzzles are user-created, meaning some are better than others, but they're also ranked, so you can filter out the worse ones. Usually, though, they're things that look pretty interesting from above and have some kind of historical, tourist, or geographical significance.
What makes it of interest to a community like this, beyond simply being a neat game, is the ability to create private puzzles accessible by entering the Puzzle ID on the front page. For example, if you put in "18B0-9563," you get a puzzle I made that should, if you do it right, direct you to my school. So you can trade puzzles of more specific interest--say, the hostel people stayed at in Tronnocon, or the park where Aussies'll be playing bocce in a few weeks. Be sure to save the Puzzle ID it gives you when you hit "create puzzle," though; otherwise your puzzle will be lost in the great series of tubes. Then, post that ID here, and people can play through it.
Or if that doesn't appeal to anybody, this thread can be coopted to discuss how creepy it is that you can find your house and school and workplace in pictures taken
from space.
