Scratch map alternative
The same countries, coloured in — and checked.
A scratch map is a good object and a bad record. The foil comes off once, the poster stays on one wall, and the number of countries on it is whatever you say it is. This page is for the moment you want the map without those three problems.
GetMap is a world map you colour in by tapping. It keeps the count and your share of the world, it travels with your account instead of your wall, and it is the only one of these that can check a country before it counts it.
Free, in the browser. No account, no card, nothing to install.
Why people replace them
Three things foil cannot do
None of this is an argument that a scratch map is bad. It is an argument about what a poster is for.
It only goes one way. Scratching is destructive. A country scratched by a housemate, a child or a hopeful evening stays scratched, and the map has no way back to the truth.
It lives on one wall. The most common reason people go looking for a digital version is a move: the map gets rolled, creased, or left behind. Ten years of travel ends in a tube in a cupboard.
It counts whatever you tell it. A four-hour layover, a border town, a country you drove through at night — the foil cannot tell the difference, so neither can anyone you show it to. For most people that is fine. For anyone who actually cares about the number, it is the whole problem.
What replaces it
A map that can check
The colouring-in is the same gesture. What sits behind it is not.
Tap a country to mark it visited, or put it on the wishlist with your trip dates. The panel keeps the running count, your share of the 195 countries, and the days until the next departure. That much is a better scratch map and nothing more.
The difference is the check-in. GetMap has a catalogue of quests — real places with a point on the map. You go there, take a photo, and upload it. Your browser reads the photo’s own geotag and measures the distance to the quest point; inside 200 m, it counts, and it pays points and a skill in that category. Nothing about that runs on trust.
The honest limit: a photo with no location data cannot be verified, and GetMap tells you so instead of counting it anyway. Phones strip geotags when location access is off — that is a setting, not a verdict on you.
| What is being compared | Paper scratch map | GetMap |
|---|---|---|
| Marking a country | Scratch off the foil — once | Tap it, and untap it |
| Where it lives | One wall | Your account, on any device |
| Proof you were there | Your word | Photo geotag within 200 m of a quest point |
| Wishlist | No | Countries with trip dates and a countdown |
| What it costs | Roughly $20–40 once, plus a frame | $0, or $49.99 a year for PRO |
| What else it does | Looks good | Audioguides, day-by-day routes, flights and hotels |
Who should not switch
Keep the poster if the poster is the point
A scratch map is a piece of furniture that happens to hold data. If you bought it to look at, nothing here replaces it.
Buy the poster if you want an object on the wall, a present that unwraps well, or something a guest notices without being shown. A browser tab does none of that, and pretending otherwise would be silly. Plenty of people keep both: the foil for the room, the account for the record.
Switch if the map has ever been rolled up in a move, if you have lost track of the number, if you want the countries you are going to next to sit beside the ones you have been to — or if you would like the count to mean something to somebody other than you.
Moving over
There is nothing to import, and that is fine
No file to export, no account to close. The countries are already in your head or on your wall; putting them in takes about a minute.
Open the map, tap every country you have been to, and the count appears as you go. You can do it without signing in — the map works straight away. Sign in with Google or Apple, or as a guest, when you want the countries, saved routes, credits and streak to follow you between devices.
Then put the next few countries on the wishlist with their dates. That is the part a scratch map has never had: the map stops being only a record of the past and starts pointing at the next trip.
Questions