Guess the Country
5 country shapes · 20 sec each
Take the #1 spot
- #1 🦓 you 🦓
5 country shapes · 20 sec each
Take the #1 spot
Guess the Country is a free daily country shape quiz on Quizebra in which you guess the country by its shape alone: the map opens zoomed in, pulls back over twenty seconds, and you pick from four countries. You play five maps a day and your score is the total time across them, so the sooner you recognize a shape the better. Everyone gets the same five maps each day.
A shape appears, already zoomed in, and widens out over twenty seconds until the whole country is on screen. Tap one of the four options as soon as you think you know it. A correct pick ends the round there; a wrong one turns red, costs ten seconds and jumps the map further out, so you see more than you had. There is no flag, no capital and no label: just the country in mint, its neighbors in gray, and the sea in black.
Your score is the total time across the five maps and lower is better. A round you never solve counts a flat twenty seconds, so the worst possible day is one hundred.
A wrong pick costs you ten of the twenty seconds rather than ten on top, so a round can never cost more than twenty. Pick wrong after the ten-second mark and the round simply ends at twenty, exactly as if you had not answered at all. Times keep one decimal, and tied times share a rank on the daily leaderboard.
The opening crop is set per country, and it comes in three kinds:
That last group is deliberate. Cropping an island nation to a fragment would leave nothing to recognize, so instead of hiding the country the zoom hides its surroundings, and what fills in over the twenty seconds is the sea and the neighbors that place it.
195 countries can be the answer: every country the site uses except Russia and Vatican City, both left out of this game only. Russia can still turn up as one of the wrong options, and so can Greenland, which is never an answer anywhere on the site.
The five rounds run easiest to hardest, each drawn from its own difficulty tier, and the mix shifts as you go: the first tier holds eight of the twelve giants and no microstates at all, while the last holds sixteen microstates and no giants. A day tends to open with something like Australia and end on Antigua and Barbuda.
The outlines are rendered from Natural Earth border data in a fixed Web Mercator projection, so a country’s shape here is the shape you would see on Google Maps or OpenStreetMap, not the one you would see on a globe.
The three wrong options are fixed per country rather than drawn fresh each time, and they are usually neighbors or countries from the same region: Germany is offered beside Poland, France and Austria, and Japan beside China, South Korea and Mongolia. Occasionally they are closer to shape-mates, as when Andorra appears beside Monaco, San Marino and Malta.
Read the four names before you study the shape. Because the wrong three are drawn from the target’s own region, the fragment only has to separate four nearby countries rather than all 195, and elimination is usually quicker than recognition.
Mind the ten-second penalty. It is worth more than the second or two you would save by guessing early on a hunch, and once the clock is past halfway a wrong pick ends the round outright. A shape that is already whole in the first frame is a tell in itself: that only happens for the forty-one smallest and most scattered countries.
It is the same starting idea, a country recognized from its silhouette, built as a race instead of a deduction. Here the shape is not all given to you at once: it starts cropped and opens out over twenty seconds, you choose from four names rather than typing freely, and you are scored on how many seconds five countries took you rather than how many guesses. If you want the deduction version, Find the Country on this site has no clock at all.
A new set of five maps arrives at midnight London time, with a fresh leaderboard, and everyone in the world gets the same five. Once the daily round is done you can keep playing practice rounds, which are unlimited and never touch the daily leaderboard. Free, no account, no ads.
Prefer flags to borders? Name the Flag is the same race against the clock, with a flag zooming out instead of a map.