Lost
0
Best
—
The map-and-compass running sport, reduced to its real skill: route choice. Six legs cross fields, forest, thicket, marsh and lakes, and a road that goes the long way round is often the fastest line. You score the time you lose — the seconds you spend deciding plus the gap between your route and the best one.
A course is six legs. It starts at the purple triangle, visits the numbered circles in order and ends at the double circle. The dashed purple line shows the leg you are on, and the circle you are heading for is highlighted.
To run a leg, tap the map to drop turning points, then tap the highlighted control. Your runner goes in a straight line from point to point, so each tap bends the route. Tapping the control straight away runs the direct line. The undo button removes your last turning point. You cannot draw a line through a lake.
The ground decides your speed. Brown roads are the fastest, pale open field is quick, light green forest is slower, dark green thicket is very slow, striped marsh is slow and blue lakes cannot be crossed. The legend under the map shows every colour. A long detour along a road is often quicker than cutting straight through forest.
Your score is the time you lose. The seconds you spend planning each leg are counted in full, and so is any gap between your route and the best route across that ground, which is worked out exactly for every leg. After you finish a leg the best route is drawn in blue so you can compare. Lower is better; a perfect, instant course scores zero.
Look for the handrail. Roads are more than twice as fast as open field and five times as fast as thicket, so a road that runs roughly the way you want to go is almost always worth a detour to reach. The classic orienteering decision is left or right around an obstacle; before you tap, trace both ways with your eye and count how much of each is road or open ground.
Straight is not safe. The direct line looks shortest but it cuts through whatever is in the way, and one patch of thicket can cost more than the whole detour around it. On the other hand, a thin strip of forest between two open areas is often worth crossing rather than going round. Judge the width of the slow ground, not just whether it is there.
Decide fast. The seconds you spend thinking count exactly the same as seconds lost on the ground, so a good-enough route chosen in two seconds usually beats a perfect one chosen in eight. Read the next leg while your runner is still moving and while the best route is being shown, and have your plan ready before the clock starts.
Use the blue line. After every leg the best route is drawn over the map. Compare it with yours: most lost time comes from the same few habits — hugging the direct line, ignoring roads, or taking a road too far past the point where you should have left it. The best route usually leaves the road at the closest point to the control, not at the corner.