How to play

A round is a deck of flags and a globe. Every flag has to go on the country it belongs to — three tries each.

Modes

Thirty flags — a short round, and the one a new game starts in: the globe already stands in flags, thirty are missing. The other 205 countries are locked under their own flags, washed out and out of play — they cannot be removed or moved. The thirty targets are drawn by difficulty: twelve of the best known, nine well known, six of the remaining sovereign states and three dependent territories.

Daily — Thirty flags with one difference: the thirty are drawn from the date, so on any given day everyone gets the same set, and it can be played once. A new set arrives at 00:00 UTC. The card keeps today's result rather than a best — tomorrow's round is a different one. With an account, that result also goes onto the board on the home page, where the day is ranked by time — including a round you played before signing in that same day, which is sent up the moment you do. The board starts empty again with every new set.

Finish Daily on consecutive UTC days and the card keeps a streak; miss a day and it starts again. Sharing a Daily result posts the score as a grid of squares — green for a flag placed first try, yellow for one that took a miss or a hint, red for one the globe placed — and never names a country, so it spoils nothing. In every other mode except Practice, whose deck is yours alone, Share hands out a link with the seed of the round you just played: whoever opens it gets exactly the same deck.

All flags — the whole deck of 235 flags. It runs from the ones everybody knows to the rarest, so a round starts easy and finishes on dependent territories. At the end the planet is fully painted.

Thirty capitals — Thirty flags with words instead of flags: every card names a capital, and it goes on its country. A hit paints the country in its flag and shows the capital above the country name. A few countries never come up in this mode and stay locked under their flags — those with no capital of their own, with a capital that shares its name with another one, or with a disputed one.

Practice — Thirty flags built out of what you have not learned yet: the deck takes the flags you have never placed yourself, easiest first, and it shrinks every time you learn one. Fewer than thirty left means a shorter round; once every flag is yours it becomes an ordinary round again. There is no best here — the deck is nobody else's, so the card on the home page counts the flags left to learn instead. That list of flags lives in this browser only: signing in carries your records across devices, not your collection, so Practice starts over on a new one.

Practice capitals — the same idea with capitals: the deck takes the capitals you have never placed yourself, easiest first, and every card names a capital, as in Thirty capitals. Capitals you know are a separate list from flags you know: Thirty capitals and Practice capitals add to it, the flag rounds never do — and the card on the home page counts the capitals left to learn.

Learning — not a round at all. The globe starts blank, with no deck and no clock: click any country and it takes its flag, and a card opens beside it with the capital, the area, the population and one thing worth knowing. Click a country that already has its flag to read the card again; the cross closes it, and so does moving the globe. On a wide screen the panel on the right keeps two lists — the countries you have opened and the ones still waiting — and a click on any name flies the globe there and opens its card. Countries with no capital of their own, or a disputed one, show a dash. Nothing is scored here and nothing is added to the flags you know — it is the place to look before you play.

US states, Australian states, Europe, Asia, Americas, Africa, Ukrainian oblasts, UK counties, French regions, Spanish regions, Italian regions, Japanese prefectures, Brazilian states, Polish voivodeships, German states, Dutch provinces, Swedish counties, Canadian provinces, Mexican states, Argentine provinces, Swiss cantons — the same game on a flat map instead of the globe: every flag of the region, one round. The map does not spin, so scroll, pinch or double-click to zoom in on the small ones; Rhode Island and Bremen are a few pixels wide at full view. The deck starts with the distinctive designs and ends with the look-alikes — the seals on blue in the USA, the bicolours in Germany; on the Europe and Africa maps it runs from the famous flags to the rare, as on the globe. Each map keeps its own best and its own collection.

US state capitals, European capitals, Asian capitals, Capitals of the Americas, African capitals, French regional capitals, Spanish regional capitals, Italian regional capitals, Brazilian state capitals, German state capitals, Canadian provincial capitals — the same flat maps with a word instead of a flag: each card names a capital and goes on the region it belongs to, as in Thirty capitals on the globe. Regions whose capital has exactly the same name as a region on the map — Berlin in Berlin, Luxembourg in Luxembourg — are left out of the round and stay locked under their flags, and so are regions with two capitals or none; a capital that only contains a name, like Mexico City or Kuwait City, still comes up. Some maps have no capitals round at all for the same reason: in Japan, Switzerland and Ukraine so many prefectures, cantons and oblasts share their capital's name that there would be little left to ask. The strong hint here is Flag, and a capitals round on a map never adds to the flags you know — nor to the capitals you know, which count on the globe only.

A turn

Each turn deals one top card from the deck. Click a country on the globe and the flag lands on it; or drag the card onto the country. While a flag is in hand, dragging does not spin the globe; but hold the card near the edge of the sphere for more than half a second and the planet slowly turns that way — that is how you reach the far side.

Every drop is checked at once. A hit keeps the flag on the country for good: confetti in its colours bursts from the borders and the country name shows for a few seconds (in Thirty capitals, with the capital above it); a placed flag cannot be picked up again. A miss sends the card back to the top of the deck with a note by the cursor and costs one of three tries. After the third miss the globe flies to the right country and the flag lands by itself — with the name, but no confetti, and it does not count towards your score.

Small countries are caught with a tolerance of about 22 pixels: drop the flag nearby and it still lands on them, and a miss into open water looks for the nearest target within the same radius. If another country is under the cursor, though, the flag goes to that one. The country under the cursor shows a translucent flag — the one in your hand, not its own, so hovering gives nothing away. In Thirty capitals there is no translucent flag at all — the flag of the capital's country would be the answer — only the usual highlight.

Hints

There are two of them. Hint opens all three facts about the flag at once: the region (“It's in Western Europe”), sea access and neighbours, and the language. Name is the strong one — it writes the country the flag belongs to above the deck, and finding that country on the globe is still yours to do. In Thirty capitals the card already carries a name, so the strong hint is Flag instead: the card turns into the flag of the capital's country, and the capital moves above the deck.

Both are counted per round, not per flag, and the line above the buttons says what is left. In Thirty flags and Thirty capitals a round comes with one Name (or Flag), one Hint and one Skip; in All flags, the long one, with three of each. After that each one costs a short ad — and when no ad is available it simply opens anyway.

A flag opened with a hint of either kind still lands on its country, but it does not join the flags you know. Both stay with their flag between tries. Thirty capitals never adds to the flags you know: nobody had to recognise a flag there. It adds to the capitals you know instead, the list Practice capitals is built from.

Skip

The button gives the flag up: the globe flies to its country and the flag lands there by itself, just as after a third miss. It stays on the globe with its name, but it is not counted as yours. Skips are free too, while the round has them left: one in Thirty flags and Thirty capitals, three in All flags. After that a skip costs an ad — but three misses still place the flag with no ad at all, and that path is never sold.

The end of a round

The round ends by itself when the last flag lands: the clock stops and the card shows the score, as “221/235 · 94% · 14:27” — how many flags you placed yourself, the percentage and the time. Flags the game placed for you, after three misses or Skip, stand on the globe but are not in the score.

Your best

Each mode has its own best — except Daily, which keeps only today's result, Practice, which keeps none at all (its deck is made of what you do not know yet, so no two rounds are the same size), and Learning, which is not a round. The better result is the one with higher accuracy, and at equal accuracy the shorter time: skipping the whole deck takes a minute, so time on its own means nothing. The clock starts with the first flag you pick up, not when you press Play.

The Daily board is ranked the other way round — by time alone, with accuracy only printed beside it. So a fast round full of Skips can stand above a slower perfect one: the board says who got through today's set quickest, not who played it best. Your record and your row on the board come from the same finished round, and the first Daily round of the day is the one that goes on the board.

Without signing in, your best stays in this browser. Signing in with Google on the home page merges it with the cloud both ways — by the same rule — and the record becomes visible on other devices. The name your Daily rows show is made up for you on sign-in; Edit name on the home page changes it. What exactly is stored is described in the privacy policy.

Share

The button on the result card builds a 1200×630 image: a frame of the globe in flags, the mode name and the score line. It offers the system share sheet first; if there is none, the image goes to the clipboard, and as a last resort the text is copied.

The globe

The globe rotates by dragging; you can zoom with the wheel, a pinch, the “+” and “−” buttons or the same keys — down to roughly 290 km of altitude. Double-clicking a country flies to it; the “Find a country…” field searches by name and flies there too.

During a round the control dock, the search and the coordinates are hidden: the name of the country under the cursor would be the answer. The dock and the search come back with the result card — and the globe starts spinning by itself.

Tips

Every miss costs a try, so a hint before a guess is cheaper than a guess before a hint. Small islands are worth zooming in on: the drop tolerance is about 22 pixels, and at a distance a neighbour is often closer than the island itself. And the neighbours hint works best once the neighbours are already under their own flags.