Flag guides
What is on the flags, why they look the way they do, and how to keep them apart. Written for the quiz, useful without it: each guide ends with the maps and modes where those flags come up.
- Capital city oddities: two, none, or movedCountries with two or three capitals, one with none, capitals that are not the largest city or were built from scratch, and how a capitals quiz copes with them.
- Stars, crescents, suns and crosses: flag symbols explainedWhat the star and crescent, the Southern Cross, the suns, the counted stars, the crosses, the weapons and the animals on the world's flags stand for, country by country.
- Flags that look alike — and how to tell them apartChad and Romania, Indonesia and Monaco, Australia and New Zealand: the near-identical flags, the one detail that separates each pair, and why they match.
- How to memorise the flags of the worldA practical method for learning all 235 flags: families first, anchor each by region, pair the look-alikes, space the repetitions, test recall on an unlabeled map.
- Nordic cross flagsDenmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland, the Faroes and Aland share one design: a cross set towards the hoist. Where each came from, and how to tell Norway from Iceland.
- Pan-African colours: the two palettesWhere the two pan-African palettes come from — Ethiopia's green, gold and red, Garvey's red, black and green — which flags use them, and how to tell them apart.
- Pan-Arab colours: black, white, green and redWhere the four pan-Arab colours come from, which flags keep the hoist triangle of 1916 and which the red, white and black tricolour, and how to tell them apart.
- Pan-Slavic colours: red, white and blue in Eastern EuropeWhy Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Croatia and Czechia share red, white and blue, why Bulgaria swapped in green, and which Slavic countries stayed out of it.
- Tricolours: why so many flags have three stripesFrom the Dutch Prince's Flag to the French Tricolore and the flags of 1848: how three stripes became the standard national flag, and which tricolours are hard to tell apart.
- The Union Jack on other flagsWhich flags still carry the Union Jack — Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, British territories, Hawaii, Canada's provinces — how to tell them apart, and who dropped it.
- Flags with unusual shapes and proportionsNepal's pennants, square Switzerland and the Vatican, Qatar's 11:28, the usual 2:3, 3:5 and 1:2 ratios, Ohio's swallowtail, and how the game's cards handle them.
New guides are added as they are written; the updates page lists every change to the site by date.