Geo Guess guide

Goal

Test how well you know the world across four geography modes, each with its own board and its own leaderboard.

The four modes

• Find the Country: a name appears at the bottom of the screen and you click that country on the map.
• Name the Country: a country is highlighted on the map and you type its name, with autocomplete to narrow the options.
• Pin the Flag: a flag appears at the bottom of the screen and you click the country it belongs to.
• Point to Point: you are given a start and an end country and type the names of bordering countries to build a chain between them.

Lives and hints

• Difficulty sets both. Easy gives unlimited lives and three hints, Normal gives three lives and three hints, and Hard gives three lives and no hints at all.
• Where hints are on, wrong guesses buy them rather than costing a life outright: the first shows the starting letter on hover, the second hides some of the countries, and the third narrows the map to around six candidates with the letter removed.
• A fourth wrong guess on the same question is what costs a life. On Hard, with hints off, the first wrong guess costs one.
• The game ends when you run out of lives or finish every question.

Point to Point

• A country you name that connects to your chain is highlighted; one that is correct but not yet connected stays grey, so the map shows you how far your chain actually reaches.
• Its three hints each cost points rather than a life: 50 for the outlines of adjacent countries, 100 for every outline, and 150 for the starting letter on hover.
• Scoring starts from a full mark for the shortest possible chain and deducts for every step beyond it, then for whichever hints you took, so route length is what the mode measures.

Working it out

Shape, neighbours and scale do most of the work when identifying a country, and flags cluster by region and history - the Nordic cross, the pan-African and pan-Arab palettes, and the Union Flag canton each narrow the field to a handful of candidates before you have recalled a single name.

Scoring

• Every correct answer pays a flat base, plus a bonus that grows with your current streak and stops growing after five in a row.
• Answering inside three seconds adds a speed bonus, and there is no partial credit for being slow but right beyond that.
• Each mode is ranked separately, so a strong result in one does not carry into another.