All flags of the world

The whole deck — 235 flags, one card at a time — on a spinning 3D globe. It starts with the flags everybody knows and ends with the rarest, against the clock.

Play the full deckFull rules →

The whole deck

Every territory that has a flag of its own and an ISO code is in the deck: 235 cards, from Japan and Brazil to Niue and Wallis and Futuna. The globe starts blank. Each card is a flag with no name on it; you put it on the country it belongs to by clicking the country or dragging the card onto it. The deck is ordered by how well known a flag is, so a round opens on the easy ones and finishes on dependent territories and the flags that look like each other. At the end the whole planet stands painted in flags, and that frame is what you share.

The clock

Time starts with the first flag you pick up, not when you press Play, and stops when the last flag lands. Three Names, three Hints and three Skips are free for the round — three of each, not one, because the round is long. Name writes the country the flag belongs to above the deck; Hint opens the three facts about it — region, coastline and neighbours, language; Skip gives the flag up and the globe places it itself. Past the free ones, each costs a short ad, and three misses still place the flag with no ad at all.

Score and best

The result card shows the score line — how many of the 235 you placed yourself, the accuracy and the time, as in “221/235 · 94% · 14:27”. Flags the globe placed for you, after a third miss or a Skip, stand on the planet but are not in the score. The best kept for the mode is the round with the higher accuracy, and at equal accuracy the shorter time: skipping through the deck takes a minute and means nothing. Without an account the best stays in this browser; signing in on the home page carries it to your other devices.

Challenge a friend

The deck of a round comes from a seed, and Share hands out a link with that seed: whoever opens it gets exactly the same 235 cards in the same order, so two times are comparable. The link carries the seed and nothing else — no names, no answers.

Which flags are in the deck

The globe draws 241 territories from the Natural Earth borders; 235 of them take a flag. The six that do not — Kosovo, Northern Cyprus, Somaliland and three territories without an ISO code — stay on the globe and simply never come up as a card; the About page says why. Flags of the world lists all 235 with name, capital, area, population and a fact each — the same facts the Hint button draws on.

Tips

Zoom in before dropping on small islands: the drop tolerance is about 22 pixels, and from a distance a neighbour is often closer than the island. Once the neighbours are already under their flags, the neighbours hint gets much stronger. And a hint before a guess is cheaper than a guess before a hint — every miss costs a try, and the third one hands the flag to the globe.

FAQ