Regions

The whole world is divided into regions. Most regions are political. A region can have sub regions. The biggest regions are states (e.g. Germany). These are mostly divided into smaller regions, like federal states (e.g. Bavaria). The number of lower levels differs from country to country (it could be up to 7 or more sub levels).

To obtain this division tree we use OpenStreetmap data via Nominatim Services.

Each such region can generate up to two bonus badges.

• one Ruler, for the player who has the most badge value in that region,
• one Mapper, for the player who has visited the most quadrants in that region.

Note: The list of regions to score, i.e. generate such badges, is manually redacted based on play activity and depth in hierarchy among other criteria. A part of this decision process is visualized on these page: Region Badges Preview. Also see the corresponding part of our FAQ.

Note: There is a time delay for mapper badges. This is for a bit of data hiding and (some kind of) privacy, as a mapper badge actually indicates, you have played in that place, unlike ruler badges which might go to players who have never been in that particular region, but their badges have been dropped by other players.

Note: When a new player starts playing, their first two regions are “activated” even if there is less activity than would usually be required to award badges. This is to encourage new players and adapt the number of regions locally.

To determine to which region a quadrant belongs, Badgers actually uses OSM service Nominatim. Such a mapping can be non unique, i.e. some quadrants overlap two or more regions. To get a one to one correspondence, the region of the center of a quadrant in the sense of Nominatim is considered the region a quadrant belongs to. Ah, well, and sometimes, if it is feasible or way too bad, we manually improve Nominatim mappings in our database. We have developed a means, that allows us, to periodically update our data from Nominatim, without such corrections getting overwritten. But this is really close to nasty details.