The Earwitness Daily: One Shared Radio Mystery a Day, Streaks, and How Scoring Works

There is a particular kind of fun that only works when everyone is doing the same thing at the same time. A crossword you can compare over coffee. A word puzzle the whole office is grumbling about by nine. The Earwitness Daily brings that to radio: every day, everyone on the planet is handed the same five mystery stations, plays them by ear, and gets a score they can measure against each other. This guide explains how the daily is built, how it is scored, how streaks work, and how to share your result without spoiling it for anyone.

If you have not played yet, start here: play today's Earwitness. If you want the deeper skill of actually placing a station by its sound, that is a separate field guide — how to tell where a radio station is from, by ear. This page is about the daily challenge itself.

The same five, for everyone, every day

Most of the app is a firehose — thousands of live stations you can wander through in any order. The daily is the opposite: a single, curated run of five, identical for every player that calendar day.

It does this without a server and without an account. Instead of picking five stations at random, the game uses the date as a seed. A seed is just a starting number fed into a shuffling routine; feed in the same number and you always get the same shuffle back. Because the date is the seed, every device that loads the game on, say, the 8th of the month produces the exact same five signals, in the exact same order — no coordination required. The next day is a different date, a different seed, a different five.

This is the same trick the Atlas country game, Where in the World, uses to give everyone one shared country a day, and the same idea behind the daily word games you already know. It means the daily is genuinely social — "I got today's in one" is a real, checkable claim — while staying completely private: your play never leaves your device.

How the scoring adds up

Each of the five rounds is scored on one thing only: how far your pin lands from the station's real transmitter. The distance is measured as a great-circle arc — the true shortest path across the surface of the globe — on the station's genuine coordinates.

The curve is deliberately generous when you are close and unforgiving when you are not:

• Pin the right city and you score close to the full 5,000 points for that round.
• Land in the right region — a few hundred kilometres out — and you still score well.
• Miss by a continent and the round is worth almost nothing.

Five rounds means a perfect game is 25,000. There is no padding and no fudge anywhere in this: no round is worth points it did not earn, and the total can never be inflated by a broken or half-loaded signal. A station whose stream will not start is quietly swapped for a fresh mystery rather than scored as a loss — dead and blocked streams are simply a fact of internet radio, and the game refuses to punish you for one.

Only after you lock in each guess does the game reveal the station's real name, country and genre. Until then, the map shows no labels at all — a fair game cannot write the answer on the board.

Reading the result grid

When you finish, your five rounds collapse into a little grid of coloured squares — one per signal, in the order you played them. It is a spoiler-free summary: it shows how well you did, never which stations were in the daily.

• 🟩 Green — pin-sharp. The right city, or all but on top of it.
• 🟦 Blue — close. The right corner of the right country.
• 🟨 Amber — you found the region, not the spot.
• 🟥 Red — a long way off.

Because the grid names nothing, you can post it the moment you finish, even if the friend you are challenging has not played yet. That is the whole point of the shape: a shareable brag that gives nothing away. Hit Share your result and the game copies a tidy block of text — the daily number, your score, the grid, and a link back to the game — ready to paste into a message, a group chat or a post. On phones that support it, it opens your normal share sheet instead.

Streaks — and how to break one

Under the daily sits a quiet motivator: the streak. It counts the number of days in a row you have finished the daily.

• Finish today's five and your streak ticks up by one.
• Miss a whole day and it resets to one the next time you play.
• Your best-ever streak is kept separately and never falls — one bad week cannot erase your record.

The streak lives entirely on your own device, in local storage, with no login. That keeps it private and instant, but it also means it is tied to this browser: clear your site data or move to a new phone and the counter starts again from scratch. There is no leaderboard and nothing to sign up for — the streak is a nudge to come back tomorrow, nothing more.

One deliberate rule makes the streak mean something: there are no do-overs on the daily. You get one honest attempt, commit to your pins, and live with the score — the same constraint everyone else is under that day. If you just want to keep playing for fun, switch to Endless, which deals a fresh five whenever you like, as many times as you like, and never touches your streak.

The honest small print

Everything on this page rests on the same rails as the rest of LiveEarthViewer. The stations are real, licensed broadcasters drawn from the community radio-browser directory; the audio streams straight from each station's own servers, and LiveEarthViewer hosts none of it. The distances are real great-circle math on real coordinates, and no station is ever named until you have guessed. The daily is deterministic from the date, not from anything we know about you — because we know nothing about you. That is the deal: a genuinely shared, genuinely global puzzle, with your play kept entirely your own.

Ready? Today's five are waiting →