City—
Shift—
Rating0
Learn the city
Drive around and find the landmarks
What did you just see?
Arrow keys or the pad to drive. Solid streets you've driven; dashed ones you've only glimpsed from a junction. There is no map — that's the point.
A navigation game with no map

The
Knowledge

You drive a cab in a city you've never seen. No map, no route line, no arrow pointing the way — you learn the streets by driving them, and you're paid on how well you remember.

Difficulty

Named after the London cabbies' exam. Plain HTML, no accounts, no tracking — progress is saved on this device only. Not medical advice, and no game can claim to prevent Alzheimer's disease.

What this does for your brain

Why the map is missing

1in100 Taxi and ambulance drivers died of Alzheimer's at about 1 in 100, against 1 in 60 for everyone else — across 9 million US death records and 443 occupations.

Bus drivers and airline pilots got no such benefit. That's the detail this whole game is built on. They drive all day too — but along fixed routes. What seems to matter is the live wayfinding: working out where you are, holding a destination in mind, and redrawing the plan when the road ahead is shut.

That work is done by the hippocampus, which is among the very first regions Alzheimer's damages — which is why getting lost in familiar places is one of the earliest symptoms. London cabbies who'd passed the real Knowledge exam were found to have measurably more grey matter in part of it, and the longer they'd driven, the more they had.

So here's what each part of the game is for

No map, no minimap, no route line
Turn-by-turn directions let you follow instructions instead of building a mental map — and people who habitually navigate that way score worse on spatial memory over time. Withholding the map is the entire active ingredient.
Dahmani & Bohbot, Scientific Reports 2020
Every city is new, and no route repeats
Drive the same route often enough and it stops being navigation — it becomes a memorised sequence of turns, which runs on a different part of the brain entirely. Novelty is what keeps the useful part working.
Konishi & Bohbot 2013 · Synapse Project 2014
The Knowledge Test
Pointing at a landmark you can't see, and placing them on a blank grid, can't be faked by remembering turns. They measure the map you've actually built — which is the thing worth training.
Standard measures of allocentric spatial memory
The hails that flash at the edge of your eye
Spotting something brief in your peripheral vision, while already busy navigating, is the one style of brain training ever shown to lower dementia rates in a randomised trial. The flashes get shorter as you get better.
ACTIVE trial: 29% lower at 10 years, 25% at 20
Refreshers on cities you've left behind
In that same trial, people who did the training once got no lasting benefit at all. The entire effect came from those who returned for short refresher sessions years later. So this game brings your old cities back — a day later, a week, a month, six months.
ACTIVE 20-year follow-up, 2026

How to get the most out of it

What this game can't claim

It would be easy to oversell this, so plainly: nobody has tested whether doing this on a screen protects the brain the way driving a real city does. The researchers behind the taxi finding say so themselves. The study is also observational — people who are good at navigating may simply be drawn to the job.

The biggest known levers aren't games at all. Roughly 45% of dementia cases are linked to 14 things you can act on: hearing, blood pressure, cholesterol, vision, exercise, smoking, drinking, sleep, head injury, air quality, depression, diabetes, education and staying socially connected. Aerobic exercise alone measurably grows the same brain region this game aims at. A game is a small, enjoyable addition to those — not a replacement.

And most "brain training" only makes you better at itself. This one measures how well you know a made-up city. That is honestly all it measures.

Sources: The Conversation on taxi drivers & Alzheimer's (2026) · Livingston et al., Lancet Commission on dementia (2024) · Edwards et al., ACTIVE trial (2017) and its 20-year follow-up (2026) · Erickson et al., PNAS (2011) · Maguire et al. on London taxi drivers (2000) · Park et al., Synapse Project (2014) · West et al., Molecular Psychiatry (2018).

What you know

The city

Streets driven0%
Landmarks0
Best fare—
Best test—

Landmarks you've discovered. Fares only ever use these — you'll never be sent somewhere you've never been.

There is deliberately no map on this screen. Where these places sit relative to one another is the thing you're building, and it lives in your head.

Menu

Cab rank

Rating0
Level1
Fares0
Avg efficiency—
Shift complete

Off duty

Fares5
Avg efficiency0%
Rating earned0

Question 1 of 5Pointing