It's not complicated. But here's everything you need to know anyway.
When you open Ballocate, you'll need to sign in with your Google account. Takes about three seconds. We use this to save your scores and let you play multiplayer — that's it. No weird forms to fill out, no verification emails, no "choose a username that's somehow not taken."
Once you're in, you land on the main menu. Pick a category (Stadiums, Footballers, Coaches, Clubs, or Mixed if you're feeling brave), choose how you want to play, and you're off. The first question loads straight away. No loading screens, no tutorials, no "are you sure you want to start?" confirmations.
Here's the deal: you see an image, you get a prompt like "Where was this player born?" or "Where is this stadium?", and you click somewhere on the world map. That's your guess. You've got 45 seconds per round and 5 rounds per game.
You can click anywhere to drop your marker, and if you change your mind (which you will, constantly), just click somewhere else. The marker moves. When you're happy with your placement — or when you've accepted that you genuinely have no idea — hit the confirm button.
After you confirm, a green pin drops on the real location and a line connects it to your guess. Sometimes the line is tiny and you feel brilliant. Other times it stretches across three time zones and you wonder if you even know what a map is. Both experiences are part of the fun.
If the timer hits zero before you confirm? The game auto-submits whatever you've got on the map. If you haven't clicked anything at all, you get the minimum 100 points. So always, always put something down. A wild guess is better than nothing.
After all 5 rounds, you get a summary: total score, a grade, and a round-by-round breakdown. You'll see exactly what you got right, what you got wrong, and how far off each guess was in kilometres. It's humbling. In a good way.
You pick your category before each game. Here's what you're getting into:
You see a photo of a football ground and guess where it is. Some are dead obvious — if you watch football regularly, you'll recognise the big ones. But then you get a stadium in Uruguay or South Korea and suddenly you're just staring at the photo trying to figure out if that's a palm tree or a pine tree in the background. Architecture and surroundings are your best friends in this category.
A player portrait appears and you guess their birthplace. Not where they play now. Not where they became famous. Where they were born. This catches people out all the time. You see Edin Dzeko and think "Manchester" or "Rome" but the answer is Sarajevo. Knowing the backstories of players pays off massively here.
Same concept as footballers, but for managers. You'd be shocked how little most people know about where coaches come from. Everyone knows Guardiola is Spanish, sure, but can you pin his hometown on a map? What about Marcelo Bielsa? Unai Emery? This category is sneakily difficult.
You see a club crest and guess where the club is based. The tricky part is that some badges look almost generic — nothing on the design screams a specific country. But pay attention to little details: text on the badge, colours that match a national flag, founding year fonts. Every bit helps.
All four categories, shuffled together. One round you're locating a stadium in Brazil, the next you're trying to remember where some goalkeeper was born. It's chaotic and it's the best mode for actually improving at the game. You can't rely on one area of knowledge.
Dead simple: the closer your guess is to the real location, the more points you get. We measure the straight-line distance across the Earth's surface (haversine distance, if you're curious) and score it like this:
| Your Distance | Points | How It Feels |
|---|---|---|
| Under 50 km | 5,000 | Nailed it |
| Under 150 km | 4,500 | So close |
| Under 300 km | 4,000 | Pretty good |
| Under 500 km | 3,000 | Right area |
| Under 1,000 km | 2,000 | Right country (maybe) |
| Under 2,000 km | 1,000 | Right continent at least |
| Under 5,000 km | 500 | Optimistic guess |
| 5,000+ km | 100 | Participation trophy |
Max possible score: 25,000 points (5 rounds × 5,000 each). It's rare, but it's been done.
The nice thing is you always score something. Even your worst possible guess earns 100 points. There's literally no reason not to click somewhere.
After each game, you get a grade based on your percentage of the max 25,000:
| Grade | Score Needed | What It Means |
|---|---|---|
| World Class | 22,500+ | You actually know your stuff. Respect. |
| International | 17,500+ | Solid knowledge. You watch a lot of football. |
| Semi-Pro | 12,500+ | Not bad at all. Room to grow though. |
| Amateur | 7,500+ | You're getting there. Keep at it. |
| Sunday League | Under 7,500 | We all start somewhere. No shame. |
Most people start at Amateur or Sunday League. That's totally normal. You learn something every single round — where a player's from, where a stadium sits, which country a club belongs to — and gradually those grades start climbing.
Solo is great, but multiplayer is where things get properly intense. Two ways to do it:
Hit "Create Room" from the menu and you get a six-character code — something like K7MJ3P. Send that to your friends via WhatsApp, Discord, text, carrier pigeon, whatever works. They open Ballocate, tap "Join Room", punch in the code, and they pop up in the lobby.
You're the host, so you pick the category and you start the game when everyone's ready. Up to 8 players per room. Everyone sees the exact same question at the same time, everyone has their own 45-second clock. After 5 rounds, the final leaderboard settles all arguments.
No friends online? No problem. Pick a category, hit Find Match, and the system pairs you with other people searching for the same category. Once enough people are found, a room gets created automatically and the game starts. No codes, no waiting around awkwardly. Just you vs. strangers who also think they know football geography.
Multiplayer tip: Speed actually matters. If you and another player both guess within 50km, you both get 5,000 points. But if you're faster, you've got more time to relax while they're sweating. Confidence counts here — don't second-guess yourself into running out of time.
A few tips that consistently help players score higher:
Stadium pictures are packed with clues. Tropical vegetation? Probably not Scandinavia. Grey skies and a running track around the pitch? Could be Eastern Europe. Modern glass facade with corporate sponsorship everywhere? Likely a top-five European league. The images are real photos from Wikipedia, so there's usually something useful in the background if you look carefully.
This is the most common mistake players make. People get an image they don't recognise and plonk their guess somewhere in Western Europe because it feels safe. But Africa produces an enormous amount of football talent — Nigeria, Cameroon, Ghana, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Egypt. South America is packed with legendary stadiums and clubs. If you broaden your guessing beyond Europe, you'll pick up points that others leave on the table.
If you're completely lost, just get the continent right. Guessing "somewhere in West Africa" when the answer is Lagos earns you 1,000-2,000 points. That's way better than panicking and clicking on Brazil. A rough guess in the right region always beats a random click on the other side of the world.
After every round, the game shows you exactly where the answer was. This is basically a free geography lesson. Pay attention to the reveals — the knowledge compounds over time, and questions do repeat occasionally if you play enough games. Players regularly tell us they've learned more about African and South American geography from Ballocate than they ever did in school.
It's tempting to stick with whatever category you're best at. But Mixed mode forces you to deal with your weak spots. Maybe you're great with stadiums but terrible at player birthplaces. Mixed mode will expose that, and exposure is how you improve. Plus, it's the most fun because you never know what's coming.
Sounds obvious, but genuinely — the best way to get better at Ballocate is to watch more football from outside your usual leagues. Catch an Africa Cup of Nations match. Watch some Copa Libertadores highlights. Look up the Asian Champions League. Every match you watch adds little bits of geographical knowledge that translate directly into points. Some players have gone from Sunday League to International just by watching a few weeks of Premier League highlights.