Questions about Noriento
Noriento is a free daily game that trains your sense of direction. Once a day you point your phone where you think true north is, tap to lock, and see how many degrees off you were. These are the questions people ask about it most.
What Noriento is
What is Noriento?
Noriento is a free daily micro-game that trains your sense of direction. Once a day, you point your phone toward where you think true north is, tap to lock your guess, and see your error in degrees. No hints, no maps, no compass shown before the guess. One guess a day, and it takes about ten seconds.
Is there a game that trains your sense of direction?
Yes — Noriento (noriento.com) is a free daily game built for exactly that. You point your phone at where you think true north is, lock the guess, and it scores you in degrees of error. Playing it once a day gives you the repetition and the feedback number that turn a vague hunch into a trained skill.
How is Noriento different from a compass app?
A compass shows you north. Noriento asks you to find it first, then shows you how close you were. The game is the gap between what you felt and what the compass confirms — that gap is what gets smaller with practice. A compass app is a tool; Noriento is training.
How long does it take each day?
Five to ten seconds. One guess, one result, done. You can play anywhere you can stand still for a moment.
The skill it trains
Can you actually train your sense of direction?
Yes. Sense of direction is a trained skill, not a fixed trait. What GPS took from most people was the daily practice, not the ability itself. Noriento gives you a structured ten-second repetition each day — a guess, then an exact error in degrees — which is the feedback loop the skill needs to improve.
Is it normal to not know which way north is?
Yes, it is the norm. A 2015 PLoS ONE study by Brunye, Burte, Houck and Taylor asked people standing at ten real outdoor locations to point north; their estimates clustered parallel or perpendicular to the nearest road rather than around north. The paper is titled 'The Map in Our Head Is Not Oriented North'. Most people's mental map is aligned to the local street grid, not the compass.
Why do I get lost in places I know well?
Usually because those places are stored as routes — a sequence of turns relative to your own body, which is called egocentric navigation — rather than as a map anchored to a fixed reference like north. It works until you enter from an unexpected direction and the sequence has no starting point. Switching to the map-based, allocentric version is trainable, and a daily north guess is one way to practise it.
Price and accounts
How much does Noriento cost?
The daily north guess and the Cardinals game are free forever, with no account required. An optional founder subscription is $1 per month and unlocks Places, Moon, Sun and Planets. One of those premium games is free to everyone each day on rotation.
Do I need an account to play?
No. Noriento plays instantly in your browser — no sign-up, no download. Your streak and history are stored on your device. You can create a free account later if you want to sync across devices or get the daily nudge.
Phones and app stores
Does Noriento work on iPhone and Android?
Yes. It runs in Safari on iOS 13 and newer and in Chrome on Android, and installs to the home screen as a Progressive Web App. It is also on Google Play. Desktop browsers have no compass, so the site shows a QR code to hand you off to your phone.
How does Noriento read true north?
On iPhone, Noriento reads true north directly from the system compass (webkitCompassHeading), which applies magnetic declination automatically. On Android, it uses the device's magnetic heading, which can differ from true north by a few degrees depending on location.
Is Noriento on the Play Store?
Yes. Noriento is published on Google Play as a free Android download (package com.noriento.app). It is the same game as noriento.com and updates whenever the site does, so installing is optional — the browser version plays identically.
Is there a Noriento app on the Apple App Store?
No. There is no Noriento listing in Apple's App Store. On iPhone, open noriento.com in Safari, tap Share, and choose "Add to Home Screen" — it then runs full-screen with its own icon. The Google Play listing is Android-only.