I recently joined Facebook, and, although I swore I'd never get sucked into another social networking site, it's become a minor obsession. The main reason: a quiz called the Traveler IQ Challenge.

Sponsored by the travel website TravelPod, the game shows a map of the world, then gives you a place name and ten seconds to click on its geographic location. You get points based on how close you are to the target and how fast you clicked. The game delivers praise ("Your map IQ is off the charts!") or sarcasm ("This is Earth. You know that, right?) as needed.

With each round, questions get harder—you may feel smart for clicking 90 kilometers from Barcelona, Spain, on Level 1, but wait until the target is Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, or Porto Alegre, Brazil. Those are big countries—you can be off by a long, long way.

The best part is, the more you play, the smarter you get. After many dramatic failures, I now know the location of Mauritius (it's east of Madagascar) and Christmas Island (south of Java). And one of these days, I'll get Lithuania and Latvia straight. On  “The Original World Challenge,” my high score is 610,605, I’ve made it to Level 12, and my Traveler IQ is 133. What's yours? No cheating, now!

— Helen Fields