Can you guess the Canberra suburb by its outline? Meet Suburble
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If you’re obsessed with Wordle like me, you’ve likely found your way to its nerdy cousins.
We’re talking Worldle (where you guess the country based on an outline of its border), Moviedle (guess the movie based on a one-second trailer), Flagdle (guess the flag), Flagle (guess the flag based on snippets shown in a grid) and Framed (guess the movie based on single frames).
Now, get ready for Suburble—the Canberra-made game that lets you guess suburbs by their outlines. Think you know the border of Bruce? How about the outline of Oxley? The shape of Scullin? This will put you to the test.
Source: suburble.au.
Created by 18-year-old ANU student Aden Power, Suburble gives you six guesses to nail down the correct suburb and was inspired by Aden’s family’s love of Wordle and similar games.
“My family plays Wordle, Worldle, Heardle, Flaggle and more every evening after dinner—actually my younger brother has insanely good geography skills so it’s mostly him doing all of the work—and one night about a fortnight ago we were discussing how the idea of Worldle could be applied in other places,” explains Aden.
“That was when it occurred to me that you could make a Worldle game basically anywhere you want because all the map data has to be public information for apps like Google Maps to use. So that night after dinner I stayed up rather late to learn about ‘shape files’ and ‘Geographic information systems’. The government makes it easy to access all the coordinates of all the suburb boundaries so when we all woke up the next morning my parents discovered that the idea had stuck with me and that I had managed to generate (quite scrappy) images of all the suburbs.”
Aden, who studies maths, says he often does “little coding projects like Suburble” because “it’s a really fun way to make something tangible”.
“I’ve been playing with code since I was quite young; my mum is a developer and showed me how when I was probably around 10. She’s really encouraged me to do stuff like this and even provided me with some advice for Suburble.”
“As an aside, I understand that these days, 10 isn’t that young to start programming anymore because it’s integrated into the school curriculums which is great news.”
Aden explains the name of the game went through several phases, starting as ‘Canberrale’ (“which doesn’t really roll off the tongue”) and input from family and friends like ‘Capitale’ ad ‘ACTle’ before Aden’s dad suggested ‘Suburble’, which Aden says stuck.
“A lot of the development went like this: letting my aunts and uncles play the game and making some little style changes based on their feedback.”
It’s clear that while the game is enjoyable in its simplicity, many hours were spent getting it there.
“For a time I thought I was going to have to manually screenshot over a hundred suburbs, which I dreaded. Ultimately I decided it would be quicker to learn to understand the coordinate files a bit more and generate the images using a bit of code. I wrote the code for that part in python which went through a few iterations.”
As for Aden’s favourite suburb shape, he says it’s “got to be Capital Hill” which (spoiler alert) is perfectly round.
“Seeing this come up while I was testing the game with my family was hilarious and I love that there is a small chance every day that this could happen again,” he says.
For Aden, it’s all about sharing the fun.
“I just wanted to say that making this public (which I did around 40 hours ago) has been so cool because I have received so, so, so much positive feedback,” he says. “I’ve been watching the analytics of the page to see that about 3000 people have played Suburble in less than two days, which is just mind-blowing.”
Want to play? Head to suburble.au. Our hint? Make sure you remember which suburbs border mountains, reserves, rivers and the ACT/NSW border!
