What you're finding. The Qiblah is the direction of the Kaaba in Makkah — the direction Muslims face in every prayer. Your job: point the needle from your city toward Makkah.

Reading the map. The gold shapes are continents. The small glowing cube marked Makkah is the Kaaba. The white dot marked You is your city.

Reading the compass. N at the top is north — the same as "up" on the map. The number is your needle's angle, measured clockwise from north:

A worked example. From Cairo, Makkah lies to the south-east. South-east sits between S (180°) and E (90°) — so the needle belongs near 135°. Check the map, estimate the angle, then fine-tune with −1° / +1°.

Scoring. Within 5° earns all 3 lanterns. Within 20° earns 2 — classical scholars accepted this general direction (jihat al-Ka‘bah) for lands far from Makkah. Further off, you simply try again; nothing is ever lost.

The trap. This level plays exactly like Level 1 — but the cities are chosen to fool you. Nearly everyone gets the first one wrong. That's the point.

Why flat maps lie. Earth is a ball. To print it flat, mapmakers must stretch it — and the stretching grows extreme near the poles. Directions read off a flat map are distorted there.

The string trick. Stretch a string on a globe between your city and Makkah and pull it tight: that is the true shortest path (a great circle). From North America the tight string runs up and over the pole:

What to do. Ignore the flat map's suggestion. Picture the tight string on the ball. From Alaska it points almost due north; from Los Angeles or New York, north-east — not east or south-east. Answer with the globe in your mind, then watch the reveal prove it.

A rare day. Twice a year the sun passes almost directly over the Kaaba at Makkah's solar noon: around May 27–28 at 12:18 Makkah time, and July 15–16 at 12:27. Muslims call sighting the direction this way rasd al-qiblah.

Why it works. At that exact minute, from anywhere on the daylit half of Earth, the sun sits precisely in the direction of Makkah. And a shadow always falls exactly opposite the sun — so every vertical stick's shadow points directly away from Makkah.

Your steps. 1) Find the stick's shadow on the ground. 2) Note the direction the shadow points. 3) Turn the needle to the exactly opposite direction — if the shadow points north-west, the Qiblah is south-east.

Real life. On those two dates you can check your home's Qiblah with nothing but a bottle, a broom, or your own shadow. Mosques worldwide still verify their orientation this way.

Step 1 — find true north. Polaris, the North Star, sits almost exactly above Earth's axis, so it never appears to move — face it and you face north (in the Northern Hemisphere). It is not the brightest star in the sky; find it with the Big Dipper:

Take the two stars at the outer edge of the Dipper's bowl and extend the line between them upward about five times its length — the bright, steady star there is Polaris. Tap it in the game.

Step 2 — the muwaqqit's number. Knowing north isn't enough: you need your city's Qiblah angle. For centuries this came from tables computed by mosque astronomers (muwaqqits) — al-Khalīlī's 14th-century tables covered 2,880 localities. When you tap Polaris, the game hands you your city's table entry.

Step 3 — execute. Turn the needle clockwise from north to the table's bearing. Samarkand's 240°, for example, lands between south-west (225°) and west (270°). One star + one number — that's how night travelers found the Qiblah for a thousand years.