Puzzle #14 — 2026-08-02
The answer was Zambia. The scene was built from Choma. Difficulty: hard. This day ran before launch and had no players.
The clues, in the order they were revealed
- A high flat plateau of open woodland and maize, with very long horizons.
- Single-storey brick houses under corrugated iron, and a row of shops with deep shaded fronts.
- Bicycles carry heavy loads along one tarred road with dirt shoulders.
- Signs are in English, and traffic keeps to the left.
- The country is landlocked in southern Africa and takes its name from a river.
What the scene was built from
The location is chosen first, from a hand-curated whitelist, and the image is generated to match the description below. That order is what makes the answer checkable: the scene is built for the place, not guessed from the picture.
| vegetation | open woodland of small broad-leaved trees, maize plots, tall dry grass |
|---|---|
| terrain | a high flat plateau with no relief and very long horizons |
| architecture | single-storey brick houses under corrugated iron, a row of shops facing the road with deep shaded fronts |
| roadside | left-hand traffic, one tarred road with dirt shoulders, bicycles carrying heavy loads |
| signage | Latin script, English (never rendered legibly) |
| light | high-altitude tropical light in dry-season haze |
Where this actually is
Choma, Zambia sits at -16.80, 26.98 — see Choma, Zambia on OpenStreetMap. The clue ladder and the table above were both written from that place before any picture existed.
This day was one of the roughly third pulled for a second look at image quality and difficulty. How the pictures are made, and why none of them is a photograph.