Choose a continent, then guess its highlighted countries.
Choose your adventure
About Karshvar
I built Karshvar to make discovering the world easier for people who
love reading history. My biggest difficulty was always geography:
from Anatolia to the Caucasus, from the Iranian plateau to
Byzantium, I kept losing track of where important events happened.
So I started studying geography, and this game grew out of that
learning. It is both a way to test myself and a step toward the
offline companion I wanted for exploring the world. I plan to add
more historical features over time.
Karshvar takes its name from an ancient Iranian word related to
today’s Persian word for country. In Avestan cosmology, the world
was described as seven regions.
Mesa Verde in Colorado preserves Ancestral Pueblo places, including
cliff dwellings and mesa-top settlements. Look beyond the dramatic
alcoves to the communities that lived and farmed here. These are
places of continuing significance to descendant Indigenous peoples.
Chaco Canyon was a major centre of Ancestral Pueblo life between
roughly 850 and 1250 CE. Its great houses and ceremonial spaces
reward attention to masonry and planning. The buildings make more
sense as part of a regional network than as isolated ruins.
Near present-day St Louis, Cahokia preserves the earthworks of a
major Mississippian centre. Monks Mound helps convey its scale, but
the open spaces between mounds matter too. Imagine an organised
urban landscape rather than a set of disconnected hills.
Poverty Point in Louisiana challenges the idea that monumental
construction requires a familiar kind of city.
Hunter-fisher-gatherer communities built its great earthworks
thousands of years ago. The curved ridges and central space are
essential to understanding the design.
Ohio’s Hopewell ceremonial earthworks combine large-scale geometry
with attention to celestial cycles. They were built about two
thousand years ago. Look for the relationships between shapes and
spaces, and remember that these are Indigenous ceremonial
landscapes, not simply engineering puzzles.
