Kupu Matawhenua: a new Māori GIS word game
There is now a small new addition to Māori GIS Mapping: Kupu Matawhenua, a weekday five-letter word game made for the Ngā Poutama Matawhenua community and anyone else who spends too much time thinking about maps, whenua, taiao and GIS.
The idea is deliberately simple. You get six attempts to find a five-letter word. Some answers are familiar GIS terms such as LAYER, POINT or QUERY. Others are kupu Māori connected with the places, relationships, environmental themes and kinds of mahi that regularly appear in Māori GIS. The aim is not to turn te reo Māori into decoration around an English GIS game. The word set includes concepts such as marae, taiao, ingoa, rāhui, urupā, tūnga, pānga, kūrae, mauri and pūaha because they belong naturally in conversations about place and spatial work.
Tākaro ināianei / Play Kupu Matawhenua →
Me pēhea te tākaro / How to play
Each weekday there is one five-letter answer. Type a five-letter guess and press Enter. The colours then show what happened:
- green means the right letter is in the right place
- amber means the letter belongs in the word but is in the wrong place
- dark red means the letter is not part of the answer
You have six rows, so there are six attempts. The game accepts any five-letter A–Z guess rather than forcing people to know a special dictionary before they can play.
If the answer contains a macron, the correct spelling is shown when the word is revealed. You do not need a macron keyboard to make the guess. For example, typing RAHUI is treated as the same five letters as RĀHUI. That keeps the game usable on ordinary desktop and phone keyboards while still displaying the kupu correctly afterwards.
He tohu / The hint
I did not want the clue sitting above the puzzle and giving away half the answer before anyone had tried. The tohu therefore stays hidden until row 5 becomes active, after four unsuccessful guesses.
The hint is also intentionally indirect. It should give you a useful direction, not provide a dictionary definition with the answer effectively removed from the sentence. A word such as MARAE, for example, might be framed through how it appears in a national spatial dataset rather than simply being defined.
That makes the fifth row a useful point in the game. By then you already have four rows of letter evidence, and the clue gives you a nudge if you are still stuck.
He aha ngā kupu? / What kinds of words are in it
The first cycle contains 66 weekday answers, roughly three working months. The sequence then begins again and continues, so the game does not simply stop at the end of the first season.
The list deliberately mixes te reo Māori with the everyday technical language used in GIS. It includes mapped places, wai and coastal features, landforms, taiao, observation, movement, relationships and kaitiakitanga as well as raster, vector, imagery and mapping concepts.
That balance matters. Māori GIS is not ordinary GIS with a few translated interface labels added later. The questions around a map can include who has authority over information, whether a precise location should be shown, whose place name is being used, what a polygon actually claims to represent, and whether publishing the data helps or harms the kaupapa. Those ideas sit alongside coordinate systems, layers, imagery and spatial analysis rather than outside them.
For more on that broader approach, see Practical Māori GIS Mapping, working with whenua, taiao mapping, and the guide to Māori place names in GIS.
I muri i te kupu / After the answer
Once you solve the word, the game does more than say whether you won. It gives a short explanation of why the answer is relevant to mapping or Māori GIS and, where there is a useful page on this site, provides a link to read more.
That means a technical word can lead into the QGIS or data guidance, an ingoa-related word can lead into the place-name material, and a taiao word can lead into environmental mapping resources. The game is meant to be a small entry point into the wider Māori GIS guide rather than a completely separate novelty.
Tuku atu / Share your result
The result can be shared without exposing the answer. The share output includes the puzzle number, your score out of six, the green, amber and dark-red grid, your current streak and whether the tohu was needed.
On supported phones and browsers you can use the normal share sheet. You can also copy a text result or save a social-media-sized result image. The word itself is deliberately omitted so someone seeing your post can still play the same puzzle.
Ngā Poutama Matawhenua
Kupu Matawhenua sits alongside the Ngā Poutama Matawhenua videos and StoryMaps already collected on this site. Those resources cover practical Māori GIS topics including whenua, hazards, council data, StoryMaps, AI, imagery, field data and building local capability.
The game is much smaller than a wānanga, obviously. It is intended to be the five-minute version: something to open with a coffee, argue about with a GIS colleague, learn an occasional new kupu from, and then get on with the actual mahi.