Tired of Wordle? Can’t get Connections, and still mad at GeoGuessr for going behind a paywall? This is precisely the problem that Selwyn College second years Ari Katz and Joseph Hunt sat down to fix last term, when they began work on what would become Guessbridge. Launched last week, Guessbridge is a new Cambridge-centred game offering daily doses of 5-minute geographic puzzles.

The basic principle for Guessbridge is simple. Each day players are shown a set of four pictures taken at random locations around Cambridge and are given a minute to pinpoint their location. The closer you get, the more points you get, and with players able to sign in with their CRSid, competition is university-wide. Ari described how the idea from the game originated all the way back in Covid when, unable to meet up with friends, he would upload photos from his daily drives to his private Snapchat story, keeping a rudimentary leaderboard with a Google spreadsheet.

“Within a week or two of coming to Cambridge, I just had the feeling that something like that would really take off here,” he explains, continuing; “everyone thinks they know Cambridge like the back of their hand, people are super competitive, they want to feel like they’re the best at something. And people have a lot of pride about their college or their neck of the woods in Cambridge”.

“Everyone thinks they know Cambridge like the back of their hand, people are super competitive, they want to feel like they’re the best at something”

If the goal of the game is to take advantage of Cambridge students’ inbuilt pride and competitive spirit, it’s fair to say it seems to be working. One player said that, despite having been introduced to it at C-Sunday, it is “so good I now play it sober," while a self-confessed “directionally challenged” student still found that they “greatly enjoyed it”.

When I spoke with the Guessbridge duo, it had been a few days since the game’s launch, and the two were still very much in the process of spreading the word about their new project. So, what does it take to go viral in 2025? Ari elaborates: “no one gets a reminder on their phone saying, you know, play Wordle today. People just do it, and you sort of need to hit a critical mass of players to get to that point.”

In a bid to try and hit that critical mass, as well as relying on organic growth through word of mouth, Ari spent time leafleting on C-Sunday, which he thinks has helped drive up traffic to the site. “There were at least ten people who, when I handed them the flyer, they were like, ‘oh, no, I’ve heard of that, it’s awesome, I play it every day,’ and they’re giving their friends a nudge as well”.

While Guessbridge’s Cambridge-centric design might make it unlikely to reach quite the same heights of similar daily games such as Wordle, Ari is hopeful that it could spread beyond the University. “If it could take off, it does have potential to be replicated in universities around the country,” he muses, before Joseph chimes in. “A couple of things would have to be changed on the code side, like at the moment you can’t actually track outside a certain area around Cambridge”.

Could we soon be seeing a proliferation of Guessbridge clones (Oxguess, Durguess, L-Guess-E – I’m here all week!) at rival institutions? It’s very possible, but definitely not the priority for now. In the first few days post-launch, Ari and Joseph have other ambitions in mind.

“The game has grown further, and has been played over 1200 times by 490 different people in its first week of existence”

“First, let’s get a thousand daily users in Cambridge,” he suggests, with this maybe being enough to reach the “critical mass” at which point the game could start to embed itself in Cambridge culture. This itself would be no mean feat, representing close to 5% of Cambridge’s student population, but the early signs have been positive. Just how positive exactly? A few moments of typing later, and Joseph has an answer. “We had 146 players on the first day,” he announces, flipping his laptop around to give me a glimpse at the brains of the operation. Since then, the game has grown further, and has been played over 1200 times by 490 different people in its first week of existence.

Of course, no game is going to get popular without being fun to play, so how does Guessbridge hold up? I’m hardly a video game reviewer, but for me Guessbridge has everything you could want from a puzzle of its kind. The website is simple and easy to navigate, and the option to sign in with your CRSid to join a leaderboard against other Cambridge students taps into my competitive streak. Most crucially of all, the game takes less than four minutes to play, and is over as soon as it has begun, leaving players coming back for more.

This, naturally, is part of the design, and Ari acknowledges that the game’s difficulty also plays a part in finding this addictive sweet spot. Too hard, and players will get frustrated and lose interest, while consistently getting full marks would be just as boring. “What I’m thinking about is how do we capture that 50-60% who are like, kind of interested but don’t have that drive to play again,” Ari says, and it’s clear that the duo are still working on perfecting the project. Nevertheless, they justifiably feel optimistic, and it is clear that Guessbridge is going nowhere anytime soon.

Answers - top left: Lucy Cavendish porter's lodge; top right: Quayside opposite to Magdalene College; bottom left: Judge Business School from Tennis Court Road; bottom right: Shell petrol station on Newnham Road