German cities, found on the map

Thirty-nine dots and no labels: every place over 150,000 people, thinned so no two sit close enough to be one question with two answers. Germany has no single dominant city and never has, so the dots are spread more evenly here than on any other map on the site, and the rivers are most of what there is to reason from.

39 to find, 8 a run.

5 rounds, 6 of 8 to pass each. Pass one and its places are yours.

⚔️ Challenge someone to German cities

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39 cities · 4 regions

What the map tells you about each one

The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for the 17 of the 39 that have one. Reading them first is not cheating.

North Germany9 on the map

Bremen: Bremen has been trading since the eighth century and its market square holds a Roland statue from 1404, the tallest of the medieval figures that marked a town’s right to run itself. The Brothers Grimm story about the four animals who set out for Bremen never actually gets them there.
Hamburg: The port handles around 8 million containers a year and reaches 100 kilometers inland, which is what a tidal river gets you. Its warehouse district, the Speicherstadt, is the largest complex of its kind in the world and stands on oak piles driven into the marsh in the 1880s.
Hanover: The elector of Hanover became George I of Great Britain in 1714, and the two crowns stayed on the same head until 1837, when Victoria took the British one and Hanover’s law would not allow a woman to have the other. The city runs a trade fair on the largest exhibition ground in the world.
Kiel: Kiel sits at the Baltic end of the canal across the peninsula and was the main base of the German fleet. The sailors’ mutiny that began in its harbor on 3 November 1918 spread across the country in a week and ended the monarchy. The city hosts the largest sailing regatta in the world each June.
Rostock: Rostock has the oldest university on the Baltic, founded in 1419, and was East Germany’s main seaport, which is why a town of 200,000 has a container terminal. Its seaside district, Warnemünde, is where cruise ships come in, and it holds a sailing week that draws more visitors than the city has residents.

Also on the mapBraunschweig · Lübeck · Oldenburg · Osnabrück

East Germany7 on the map

Berlin: Berlin has about 3.7 million people and is nine times the area of Paris, so it is a city of gaps: allotments, lakes, forest and the empty ground the Wall left. It has been the capital of five different German states and was not the capital at all between 1949 and 1990.
Dresden: Dresden was the baroque capital of Saxony and was burned out by bombing on the nights of 13 and 14 February 1945, with a death toll now put at around 25,000. The Frauenkirche was left as a heap of rubble for fifty years as a memorial and was rebuilt between 1994 and 2005 using the original stones where they could be identified.
Leipzig: Bach was cantor at the Thomaskirche here for twenty-seven years and is buried in it. The city has held a trade fair since 1190 and printed books since the fifteenth century. The Monday demonstrations that began at its Nikolaikirche in 1989 are the reason it is called Heldenstadt, the city of heroes.

Also on the mapChemnitz · Erfurt · Magdeburg · Potsdam

West Germany12 on the map

Cologne: The Romans founded it in AD 50 and named it after Agrippina, who was born there; the name is simply the word colony. Its cathedral was begun in 1248, abandoned for three hundred years with a crane on the unfinished tower, and completed in 1880 to the original plan, at which point it was the tallest building in the world.
Düsseldorf: Düsseldorf is the capital of the most populous state and the one city in the Ruhr region that stayed white collar: advertising, fashion and Japanese business, with the largest Japanese community in Germany. Kraftwerk built their studio here in 1970 and more or less invented electronic pop in it.
Essen: Essen was the Krupp works, which at its height employed tens of thousands and armed Germany in both wars. Its Zollverein colliery, closed in 1986, was called the most beautiful coal mine in the world and is now a UNESCO site, which is roughly the story of the whole district in one address.
Frankfurt: Frankfurt is where German banking is and where the European Central Bank sits, and it is the one German skyline with towers in it. The emperors of the Holy Roman Empire were elected here from 1356 and crowned here from 1562, and the first attempt at a German parliament met in its Paulskirche in 1848.
Koblenz: Koblenz is where the Moselle meets the Rhine, and the spit of land between them is called the Deutsches Eck, the German corner. The Romans put a fort here for the same reason, and the name is a worn-down version of their word for a confluence.

Also on the mapBielefeld · Bonn · Dortmund · Kassel · Münster · Saarbrücken · Wiesbaden

South Germany11 on the map

Freiburg: Freiburg is the sunniest and warmest city in Germany, at the western edge of the Black Forest above the Rhine plain. It has narrow water channels called Bächle running along its streets, fed from the river since the Middle Ages, and it has been run on a green ticket for longer than almost anywhere else in Europe.
Munich: Munich sits at about 520 meters with the Alps 50 kilometers away and visible from it on a clear day. Oktoberfest began in 1810 as a horse race for a royal wedding and now takes about six million people a fortnight. The Olympic Games held here in 1972 ended with eleven Israeli athletes and coaches murdered.
Nuremberg: Nuremberg was the unofficial capital of the Holy Roman Empire and kept the imperial regalia for nearly four hundred years, which is why the Nazis staged their rallies there and why the trials were held there in 1945. The pocket watch was invented in the city around 1510 and the first German railway ran from it in 1835.
Stuttgart: Stuttgart is built in a basin with vineyards on the slopes inside the city limits, which is unusual for a place that also builds most of the country’s cars. The name comes from a stud farm. Both Mercedes-Benz and Porsche are headquartered here, a few kilometers apart.

Also on the mapAugsburg · Ingolstadt · Karlsruhe · Mannheim · Regensburg · Ulm · Würzburg

Now find all 39 on the map

How this one works

How many cities are on the map?

39. Every one of them is on the map, and a run asks 8 of them. Pass a round and the places you found in it drop out of the pool, so the next run is what you have left.

What is a round?

A run of 8 questions, and 6 right passes it. 5 rounds cover the whole map, and the counter at the top of the Germany page counts the ones behind you. Passing is what banks a round's finds: miss the mark and nothing is taken off the map, so every place that round asked about is still there to be asked again. A round is always the places you have not found yet, and when fewer than five are left it is topped up with a few you have found as review, so the last round is never one or two questions. Three quarters of it passes it.

Can I start the map over?

Yes. "Reset this map" under the counter puts all 39 back in the pool and sets the rounds to zero the moment you press it, so the whole map is there to be found again from nothing. It clears this map only; the other maps of Germany keep their progress.

Do I need an account?

No. The game plays in the page, and a guest's progress is kept in their own browser. Signing in carries it between devices and earns XP for a run.

What happens when I get one wrong?

The map names what you actually hit, then lights up the right answer in green and tells you something about the place. Missing one is how most of this map gets learned.

The other maps of Germany

German states16 to find German waters16 to find

The same map for other countries

North America

Oceania

South America

All of Germany’s maps together on the Germany atlas page, the country itself on the Germany guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.