Guess the Landmark
A place that appears on a hundred million postcards, cropped down to a patch of its surface. At 7x you get masonry, ironwork, glass or rock, and the round is a question about material and craft rather than about travel.
80 landmarks, all chosen for a lead photograph that shows the whole structure in daylight. That constraint matters: a night shot or a detail photograph would make the last rung as unreadable as the first.
Name the landmark from one fragment of stone.
Play Guess the LandmarkStone tells you the century
Limestone weathers to a warm sand colour and erodes in soft rounded edges — Giza, the Colosseum, Petra. Marble stays white or grey-blue, holds a crisp arris where two faces meet, and streaks vertically where rain has run down it: the Parthenon, the Taj Mahal, the Washington Monument. Granite is speckled at close range and refuses to erode at all.
Tooling is as informative as the rock. Massive blocks with fine drafted margins and no mortar line are ancient monumental masonry. Regular small courses with visible mortar are medieval or later. Machine-cut ashlar with joints under a millimetre is nineteenth century or newer.
Red sandstone is a small and useful club: Petra, Uluru, the Grand Canyon and the walls of a couple of Indian monuments. If the crop is red rock, decide first whether you are looking at something carved or something natural — the tool marks are usually visible at 7x.
Metal, glass and the modern half of the deck
Riveted wrought-iron lattice, painted brown, is the Eiffel Tower and essentially nothing else in the deck. Suspension-bridge cable wrapped and painted is the Golden Gate or the Brooklyn Bridge, and the two differ in colour and in what the towers are made of — one steel, one masonry.
Modern glass curtain wall is harder, because a crop of tinted glazing looks the same in Dubai and Kuala Lumpur. Look for the mullion spacing and the shape of the reflection: the Burj Khalifa's facade steps inward, the Petronas Towers have a strongly repeated Islamic geometric motif in the plan, and Marina Bay Sands is horizontal where the others are vertical.
Copper that has gone green is the Statue of Liberty. Polished steel spheres are the Atomium. These are the rounds worth taking at the first rung, because you will not do better by waiting.
The ladder and the deck
7x, 4.5x, 3x, 2x, 1.3x. Buildings survive a shallower crop than paintings do, because brick reads as brick — the useful information arrives early and the shape arrives late.
The 80 landmarks are weighted towards the ones with a genuinely famous surface: a large European block, a dozen in the United States, and a long run through Mexico, Peru, Brazil, Egypt, Jordan, the Gulf, India, China, South East Asia, Japan, Australia and southern Africa. The reveal names the landmark and where it is.
Scoring
Ten rounds at 1000, 620, 380, 240 and 150, plus up to 160 for a fast answer. The second rung is usually where a structural edge enters the frame, and an edge is worth more than another 4x of the same wall — if the first rung is featureless, buy immediately rather than studying it.