Geography clues decoded

Destination clues are the heart of the series and the reason teachers loved it: each one is a small piece of real geography, history, currency, language or landmark trivia, dressed up as a riddle. Learn the categories and the riddles stop being riddles.

The common clue types

• Currency. "Changed money into yen" means Japan; "rubles" meant the Soviet Union. The bundled almanac listed currencies by country.
• Flag colors. A clue describing a flag's colors or emblem narrows you to a handful of nations.
• Language and greetings. A witness who heard the crook say a foreign phrase is handing you the country's language.
• Landmarks. Asking about the Kremlin, the Parthenon or a famous river ties the crook to one place.
• Industry, climate and food. References to a chief export, a hemisphere, or a regional dish all map to geography.

How to read them like a sleuth

A single clue often fits several countries. The trick is to cross-reference: collect more than one destination clue in the city and find the one place all of them share. Flag colors plus a currency plus a named river usually resolve to exactly one country. The reference book each game shipped with, The World Almanac for the 1985 game, Rand McNally's Concise Atlas of Europe for Where in Europe (1988), exists precisely so you can look up the fact a clue assumes you know.

When clues seem to contradict

They never actually do. If two destination clues point to different places, you have misremembered a fact or misread one clue. Re-read both, look the harder one up, and the contradiction resolves. Acting on a guess is how sleuths lose cases they should win.