A mining idle-game studio built a "new Wordle" in three weeks: dailymap.fun and the crowded daily geography game lane

A UK mobile studio best known for idle games like Bitcoin Miner watched MapTap get called the "new Wordle" in the press, then built the same gameplay into a three-platform app within three weeks and added a full mobile retention system. It got some traffic, but not much. For anyone considering a similar move, it's more a case study: how fast a studio with engineering and marketing muscle can enter a trending category, and how much it can actually win once it's in.

Update from Nov 5

On Nov 5, dailymap.fun shipped version 0.9.10 to the App Store. The release notes have eight lines, including "Lost your streak? You can recover it after your next daily run", "New Plus page in the store, with a 7-day free trial for new subscribers", "The first round each day is easier", and "Missions now reset on your local time zone". The app had only been live for three weeks (iOS 10-16, Google Play 10-18), and the version number hadn't reached 1.0 yet.

The store listing ends with "Made by a small indie team". The developer, Fumb Games, is actually a London mobile game studio with more than twenty staff, including a growth lead, a paid acquisition manager, ad creatives, and playable-ad developers (from the fumb.games team page). On Google Play it publishes a series of idle games, including Bitcoin Miner Idle Tycoon, Idle Mine!, and Idle Business Empire, and three of them alone have roughly 7.96M lifetime installs. The package name is com.fumbgames.pindrop, and the Play description still includes the word "Pindrop+". Inference: the product was originally called Pindrop, then renamed dailymap.fun after clashing with an existing web game of the same name.

What it is

The gameplay can be described in one sentence: everyone gets the same five place names each day. You spin the 3D globe, zoom in, and drop a pin. The closer you get, the more points you score. Each round is worth 100 points, and the daily maximum is 1,000, with bonus points for guessing the right country or continent. The first few places are easy, the last two are really hard, and a round takes two or three minutes.

This gameplay is nearly identical to MapTap.gg, down to the 1,000 maximum score and harder late-round questions. MapTap is a web game built by John Donham in 2024. In 2026, on Jun 18, TechCrunch published "MapTap, a daily geography game, is my new Wordle". NPR recommended it again on Sep 5, and it hit Hacker News. Its iOS version has 16,975 ratings in the US store, and its Android version launched Aug 22 and had reached 6 lifetime installs by Nov 30,220.

Why now

The category had just been fueled by media attention, but the stores hadn't caught up yet. MapTap's Android version didn't arrive until August 2026 years later, and before that, searches for "daily geography game" on Play mostly returned traditional quiz-style geography apps. dailymap.fun launched right in that gap.

Its store title uses the domain name directly, and the description piles on keywords like "daily geography guessing game", "daily map guessing game", "geography quiz", and "travel trivia". It's clearly aiming at store search.

Scale

Not big, but growing steadily:

For comparison, MapTap's Android added about 4,022 installs in the same week and charted in 21 countries. dailymap.fun's weekly growth is roughly 44% of that, and its rating volume on iOS is only about 1% of MapTap's. The UK has more than twice as many ratings as the US, and it only charts in English-speaking countries, with the version number still at 0.9.x. This is a typical mobile studio soft launch: test retention in home and small English-speaking markets first, then decide whether to go global.

The user comments are simple. On Play, one 10-30-star review says: "Didn't expect to know this much (and didn't expect so many things I don't know! lol)"; another 11-05 says: "Fun, I hope I remember to play every day." The second one hits the core problem with this type of game: you have to remember to open it daily.

Where users come from

• Store search, riding category heat: this is the most certain part. On the Education free charts in the UK, Australia, and Canada, a few hundred installs a day is enough to rank in the top 60. It has stayed on those charts, and the chart placement itself brings exposure.
• Own channels: Fumb's Play developer page and the "More by Fumb Games" section on several older games link to it. Fumb's Discord has about 256k members, and the official r/dailymapfun subreddit exists. Its update log says "join our Reddit or Discord". I couldn't find whether it runs cross-promo ads inside its older games.
• Paid acquisition: The company has a full UA team, but I found no ads for it in public channels. Meta and similar ad libraries not showing ads doesn't mean none were run. At 100 to 400 new installs a day, this looks more like small-scale tests or organic traffic than large paid campaigns (inferred).
• Social sharing: The app has one-tap score sharing, friend codes, team leaderboards with group chat, and "Nudge friends who haven't played". But I couldn't find any user-made dailymap.fun content on TikTok or X. MapTap does have people posting daily scores on TikTok ("Daily map tap day 2, report your score in the comments"). dailymap.fun doesn't have that kind of organic score sharing yet.

How it differs from MapTap: turning a web mini-game into a mobile game

The gameplay is the same. The difference is the layer around it:

In short, it gives away for free what MapTap charges for, then sells streak protection, backfills and cosmetics. That's the most natural monetization spot for Wordle-style games. But given the "spreading server costs" line and its absence from the grossing charts, its revenue is probably still small (inferred).

Who it's competing with

The category is crowded, and there's a recognized original:

• MapTap.gg: covered by media, available on all three platforms, and has the largest user base.
• PlayPinDrop (playpindrop.app): a same-format game by an indie developer, web plus iOS. It claims 5,000 daily players (unverified). It has released 12 versions covering cities, sports and historical maps, and has a "Games like MapTap" page built to capture SEO traffic.
• Daily Map (dailymap.game): a name nearly identical to dailymap.fun, but a different company. It's a web-only MapTap clone.
• GeoHistory, HistoPin, Wherio, FactMap, Farflung and others: variants that swap the prompts for historical events to locate, or score higher for obscure answers. Wherio published a "10 games like MapTap" post in October.
• Further out are earlier daily geography and guess-the-era games like Globle (600k Android installs), Worldle and TimeGuessr, plus GeoGuessr (12.4M Android installs).

dailymap.fun is itself one of MapTap's followers. I haven't seen anyone specifically copying it yet.

If it were you

C | You can learn from it, but following it isn't worth much. Building an English daily pin-the-location game means entering a category that already has an original, a set of clones, and press coverage. Even a company with a UA team only got about 3,000 installs in three weeks, and it's relying on optional ads to cover server costs.

Good fit for: small teams that already have an audience or community (older games, Discord, local media accounts) and can drive traffic cheaply. Also people whose first language isn't English and who know their country's geography and cultural references well, who can build a local version: locations are the country's counties, stations and landmarks, and the first users are local geography and travel fans.

Not a good fit for: anyone aiming to go head-to-head with MapTap in English, or anyone hoping one game's subscriptions will pay for a team. Wordle-style games have always made thin money. Wordle itself was eventually sold to the New York Times as a traffic driver.

How to do it: what's worth copying is the playbook, not this product. First, watch for daily mini-games that media has boosted but that exist only on web or one platform, and ship a full cross-platform version within a few weeks, before the original catches up. Second, give away what the original charges for (groups, practice) and sell streak freezes, backfills and cosmetics. Third, use a memorable domain as the store title and pack category keywords into the description. For a local version, attach a short story or trivia to each location that only locals would get. That's harder to copy than adding a mobile-game layer.

How to acquire users: growth for daily games comes from sharing scores. The shareable score card has to be readable at a glance in group chats and short videos, like Wordle's colored squares. Combine that with category keyword search in the store, and with local geography and travel communities and creators.

Timing: the English-market window has essentially closed. A local version has to ship before MapTap goes multilingual, or before an existing local Worldle-style site adds pin-drop gameplay. The sooner the better.

Signs you've misjudged this: if dailymap.fun goes global (version 1.0, clearly more charting countries), its weekly installs catch up to or pass MapTap, or it enters the Games or Education grossing charts, then the "free plus mobile-game layer" model is actually making money in this category, and the grade should be revised to B or higher. Conversely, if it drops out of the top 100 on the UK charts early in 2027 and stops updating, that means even a well-resourced follower couldn't make it work.