Order the Country
8 countries · 1 metric
Take the #1 spot
- #1 🦓 you 🦓
8 countries · 1 metric
Take the #1 spot
Order the Country is a free daily geography puzzle on Quizebra in which you rank countries by one measure, such as population or area: eight shuffled countries, the “most” end at the top. The measure changes daily and is one of six: population, area, coastline, highest peak, population density or land neighbors. You are scored on how close your order is to the true one, so a near miss still earns most of the marks. Everyone gets the same eight countries and the same measure each day.
Drag a card to where you think it belongs. The top of the list is always the “most” end: the highest population, the largest area, the longest coastline. There is no timer, so the only thing being measured is the order you settle on. When the list looks right, press Submit.
Take each country, count how many places it sits from where it belongs, and add those eight numbers up. That total is your distance from the correct order. The worst possible distance with eight countries is 32, which happens whenever the top four and the bottom four trade halves completely, so each place of displacement costs 3.125% and your percentage is 100 minus 3.125 times the total. (For the curious: this is the Spearman footrule distance, normalized against that worst case.)
The smallest mistake available to you is swapping two neighbors, which costs two places and scores 94%. Moving one country four places out of place scores 75%, because the four it passes each shift along by one. Misjudging an end is what really hurts: carrying the bottom country all the way to the top shifts the other seven down one as well, for 14 places and a score of 56%.
The eight never arrive accidentally correct. The starting arrangement is built so that no country begins in its own place, and so that it always starts below 20% before you have touched anything. After you submit, the correct order is shown beside yours with every country’s real value, and the name of the peak when the measure is the highest point.
There are six, on a fixed ten-day rotation rather than at random:
Those last two are where intuition tends to collapse. Density reorders the familiar map, and the counting one is narrower than people expect: only China and Russia reach 14 land neighbors, Brazil alone has 10, and no country in the world has 11, 12 or 13.
There are 500 puzzles in all, 100 each for population, area, coastline and highest peak and 50 each for density and land neighbors. The measure and the puzzle advance together, so the same puzzle comes round once every 500 days.
Every set is built so that no two of its countries sit close together on that day’s measure. Values have to be at least 10% apart for population, area and coastline, 5% apart for highest peak and 20% apart for population density, and a land-neighbors set always uses eight different counts. Nothing ever comes down to splitting a tie or a rounding error.
Each set also takes at most one country from the bottom fifth of the table, so you are never sorting six microstates against one another; for coastline that cap is one landlocked country, and density rounds leave out countries under a million people, which are dense only because they are tiny. Across the hundred puzzles for population, area, coastline and highest peak, every country in the game appears at least once.
Population, area, coastline, highest point and land borders come from the 2025 edition of the CIA World Factbook; population density is population divided by area. The game draws on 196 countries.
Anchor the two ends first: the one country you are certain is top and the one you are certain is bottom. Then keep whatever you are least sure about near the middle. Scoring is by distance, so a doubtful country parked at an extreme is the expensive mistake: it can be seven places wrong there, against four or five in the middle.
A new puzzle arrives at midnight London time, with a fresh leaderboard, and everyone in the world gets the same eight countries and the same measure that day. Once the daily one is done you can keep playing practice rounds. Free, no account, no ads.
Prefer the measures combined? Match the Country takes four of them, each from both ends, and has you place eight countries into eight categories at once. Or switch from numbers to shapes with Guess the Country, which zooms slowly out of a country’s outline.