So, What Actually Is This?
Ballocate is a free game where you get shown a football-related image — could be a player's face, a stadium shot, a club crest, whatever — and you have to click on a map to guess where it belongs. Birthplace of the player, location of the stadium, home city of the club. That sort of thing. The closer you click to the real spot, the more points you get.
If you've ever played GeoGuessr, it's that same "pin the location on the map" feeling, but everything revolves around football. Five rounds, 45 seconds each, and a score at the end that'll either make you feel like a genius or remind you that you really don't know where Cameroon is on a map. (No judgement. We've all been there.)
How a Round Works
Each game is five rounds. You get an image and a prompt — something like "Where was this player born?" or "Where is this stadium?" — and you've got 45 seconds to click somewhere on the map. You can move your guess around before locking it in, so don't panic if your first click was way off.
Once you confirm, the game shows you the real answer with a green pin and draws a line between your guess and reality. Sometimes that line is pleasantly short. Sometimes it stretches across an entire ocean and you sit there wondering how you mixed up Argentina with Spain. The scoring goes from 5,000 points (basically nailed it, under 50km away) all the way down to 100 points (you were on the wrong continent entirely, but hey, at least you tried).
Ways to Play
- Solo — Just you against the clock. Good for practice, good for killing ten minutes, good for settling personal scores with yourself.
- Create Room — Make a private room, get a six-character code, send it to your mates. Up to eight people in one room, all answering the same questions live. We've had groups use this during halftime of actual matches and honestly it gets competitive fast.
- Find Match — Don't have friends online? Same. Hit Find Match and the system pairs you with strangers who picked the same category. No codes, no waiting around, just straight into it.
Pick Your Category
- Stadiums — Photos of grounds from around the world. Some are obvious, some will make you question everything you thought you knew about architecture.
- Footballers — Player portraits. You're guessing their birthplace, not where they play now. This trips people up constantly.
- Coaches — Same deal as footballers but for managers. Turns out most people have no idea where Ancelotti was actually born.
- Clubs — Club crests. You'd be surprised how many people can recognise a badge but can't point to the city on a map.
- Mixed — A bit of everything, shuffled randomly. Keeps you on your toes. It's the most popular mode because you never know what's coming next.
What We're Trying to Do
Honestly? Make people better at football geography while they're having fun. That's it. There's something genuinely cool about learning that a player you've watched for years actually grew up in a town you've never heard of, in a country you couldn't place on a map five minutes ago. Football connects an absurd number of places and cultures, and most of us only ever think about the big European cities.
Ballocate is free. No download, no paywall to access features, no "watch 3 ads to unlock the next round" nonsense. You sign in with Google and you're playing in seconds. There are ads between rounds to keep the lights on (we're not a charity, unfortunately), but they're not in your face during actual gameplay.
Behind the Scenes
The game runs on pretty simple tech, which is kind of the point. It's a web app — HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Firebase handling the real-time multiplayer stuff. No massive framework, no complicated build process. The map is Leaflet (open source, brilliant library) and all the images come from Wikipedia's database, so they're real photos that stay reasonably up to date.
We're always adding more questions, tweaking the experience, and fixing the weird edge cases that pop up when real humans interact with code in ways you never expect. If you spot something broken or have an idea for a feature, drop us a line on the contact page. We read everything that comes in.
Thanks for playing. Or at least thanks for reading this far. Go try a round — we promise you'll learn something, even if it's just that you have no idea where half of South America is.