About the game
Geography, one border hop at a time.
Hople is a daily geography puzzle about the connections between countries. Each challenge gives you a starting capital and a destination capital. Your task is to build the shortest route between them by moving only between countries that share a land border.
Why capitals and borders?
Capital cities make each step recognisable, while land borders provide the rule that links the route together. A move from New Delhi to Naypyidaw is valid because India and Myanmar share a land border. The distance between the cities is not what decides the move: political geography does.
This creates routes that are often surprising. Two capitals may look close on a map but require several border hops, while distant capitals can be connected through a compact chain of neighbouring countries. Hople is designed to reward that kind of geographic reasoning rather than memorised airline distances.
How the daily puzzle is made
Hople models countries as a graph. Every country-capital pair is a node, and a graph edge joins two nodes when their countries share an accepted land border. The game uses a shortest-path calculation to determine the fewest valid border hops between the daily endpoints.
The date selects a deterministic puzzle, so players receive the same challenge for that day. Difficulty is based on the number of moves in the stored shortest path: shorter routes are easier, while longer routes require a broader understanding of regional connections.
Data and editorial choices
The bundled graph combines country and border information with capital coordinates validated against the GeoNames gazetteer. The project includes checks for coordinates and known political-code differences, plus documented local corrections where a source is incomplete or ambiguous.
Geography and political status can be disputed or change over time. Hople makes explicit editorial choices so the game remains playable and consistent; inclusion in the graph is a gameplay representation, not a statement resolving sovereignty or diplomatic disputes. Corrections are reviewed before being added to the published dataset.
What Hople records
No account is required. A random browser identifier connects your daily attempt to your statistics and helps enforce one submitted attempt per puzzle. It is not a secure account system, and clearing the browser cookie resets that identity. Details about stored results, advertising and external services are explained in the privacy policy.