Homegrown Music Festival starts next week with acts performing in venues across Duluth and Superior. You can read a detailed history of the festival on its website. And you can test your knowledge of this year’s festival by taking the PDD Quiz. And here you can test your knowledge of this year’s Homegrown venues by playing one of this week’s three Geoguessr challenges.

Homegrown takes place at so many different venues around Duluth and Superior that one challenge didn’t seem sufficient. So this week’s PDD Geoguessr consists of 15 venues across three different difficulty levels.

The first-timers’ challenge requires no previous knowledge of the venues and follows the standard rules: it consists of five Streetview images with five minutes per round to guess the location.

The regulars’ challenge is a bit trickier: it takes you to the interior of five different Homegrown venues. You can pan around the room, but you can’t move from the fixed location of the Photosphere. You have three minutes per round to look for clues and guess the location.

And finally, the die-hards’ challenge: Again five interiors, but you can neither move nor pan. It’s just a single still image of a distinctive part of a Homegrown venue interior. And you only have 90 seconds per round, because in this challenge, you either know it or you don’t.

Feel free to play only the challenge that matches your Homegrown experience level or, if you want to be certain not to get lost on the way to the show, play all three.

Homegrown 2024 Venues: First timer

Homegrown 2024 Venues: Regular

Homegrown 2024 Venues: Die hard

How to Play Geoguessr

GeoGuessr can be played on a laptop or desktop and on Android or IoS mobile devices with the GeoGuessr app. Just click on the link that fits how you play. You can create an account to keep track of your scores and see how you compare to other players or just click on one of the links above to play as a guest without having to create an account or log in.

Every game consists of five locations based on a theme chosen by the game creator. You are shown a Streetview image stripped of all the informational labels that are normally overlayed onto the image. Unless the challenge specifically restricts it, you can move around and look for clues like street signs and business names to find out where you are. The image below shows a basic overview of the Geoguessr screen layout and controls.

Once you think you know the location — or are nearly out of time — you use the inset map to place your marker where you believe the round started. After you hit “Guess,” you will see how close you were to the correct location and how many points your guess earned. The closer you are to the location, the higher your score, with a maximum score of 5,000 points. On a map that covers a small area, like the Gary-New Duluth neighborhood, being off by a few blocks will cost you a lot of points. On a map that has locations from around the world, you will get nearly all the points just for finding the right city. The maximum error for a perfect score also changes by map size, but in general if you are within 50 feet (15 meters) you will always get the full 5,000 points.

Not often, but every now and then, GeoGuessr gets a little buggy. If the underlying Streetview imagery has changed since the game was made, sometimes it repeats the last round, gives a black screen, or doesn’t allow a guess to be made. If that happens, please let me know and I’ll update the challenge.

At the end of the five rounds, an overview screen shows your score for each round in addition to your guessing time and how far off you were from the correct location. The correct locations and your guesses are also shown on a map and you can click on any of the round numbers to review the locations. Additionally, the final screen in a challenge will show how you rank compared to the top scorers of the challenge. When choosing your user name, keep in mind that your user name and score per round will be visible to other players of the challenge.

If you have feedback on this challenge or ideas for future challenges, please share them in the comments below.