Flags of the world quiz
A 3D globe with 241 territories drawn from Natural Earth and a deck of 235 flags — one for every territory with a flag of its own and an ISO code. The globe carries no names: the flag is the whole question.
Seven ways to play the same globe
Thirty flags is the default round: the globe is already dressed in flags, thirty countries stand blank, and the deck holds their thirty flags in order from the well known to the obscure. The rest of the planet is locked and cannot take a flag, so the search narrows as you go. A round takes about five minutes.
Daily deals the same thirty flags to everyone, once a day, with a new set at 00:00 UTC. The result shares as a grid of coloured squares — one per flag, green for a first-try hit without hints, amber for a hit after a miss or a hint, red for a flag the globe placed for you — and a streak counts the days in a row. Signed-in players appear on the day's board, ranked by time with accuracy beside it.
All flags is the whole deck, 235 cards, timed from the first flag you pick up. It is long — a good run is a quarter of an hour — and it is the mode that shows which corner of the world you still have to learn.
Thirty capitals turns the card round: instead of a flag it names a capital — Ulaanbaatar, Paramaribo, Nuku'alofa — and the country you drop it on takes its flag. Nine countries never come up here: those without a capital of their own, those whose capital shares a name with another, and the disputed ones.
Practice and Practice capitals deal only what you have not placed yourself yet, easiest first, thirty at a time or however many are left. There is no record in them, because no two players get the same deck; the home page counts what is left to learn instead.
Learning is not a round at all. The globe starts blank and silent; click any country and it takes its flag, with its capital, area, population and one thing worth knowing beside it. It is the place to look something up before a round, or to wander.
What is in the deck
All 235 flags of the world's countries and territories with an ISO 3166-1 code, matched to the country outlines by that code: the sovereign states, the dependencies from Greenland to Niue, and territories such as Puerto Rico, the Faroe Islands or French Polynesia that fly a flag of their own. Six territories on the globe take no flag — Kosovo, Northern Cyprus, Somaliland, the Indian Ocean Territories and Siachen Glacier have no code in the border data, and Ashmore and Cartier Islands share Australia's — so the deck has 235 cards for 241 outlines. Crimea is shown as part of Ukraine.
The flags are dealt in tiers. The first cards are the ones most people know — Canada, France, Brazil, the United States, the Nordic crosses — and the last are the ones almost nobody does: the Cook Islands, Montserrat, Wallis and Futuna. The order is the same for everyone, so the difficulty curve of a round is fair, and so that a first-time player is not asked about Niue before Italy.
Hints, misses and the score
Every flag has three tries. A miss puts the card back on top of the deck with a short note over the cursor; after the third miss, or when you press Skip, the globe flies to the right country and places the flag itself, and that flag stays out of the score. Three helpers are free each round: Name writes the country's name above the deck, Hint opens three facts — the region, the coast and neighbours, the language — and Skip gives up on a card. Beyond the free ones each costs a short ad. The score line at the end is the flags you placed yourself, the percentage, and the time; a flag opened with Name is placed, but it does not join the collection of flags you know.
How to get better at it
Flags come in families, and the families are easier to learn than the flags: the Nordic crosses, the pan-Arab black-white-green-red, the pan-African green-gold-red, the pan-Slavic white-blue-red, the Union Jack in a canton, the stars of the Southern Cross. Once the family is placed, the details settle the country — the shade of blue that separates Chad from Romania, the emblem that separates Mexico from Italy, the width of the stripes that separates Indonesia from Monaco. The guides go through each family with the flags side by side, and one of them is about learning the whole deck. The flat maps of Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas deal the same flags one continent at a time, closer up.
Landing pages for Daily, All flags and World capitals explain each round in detail. Flat maps of countries — US states, Japanese prefectures, German states and more — are listed on the home page. Every flag of the deck with its capital, area, population and a fact is on Flags of the world; the full rules and the about page cover the rest.