WORLD MAP

No flat map of a sphere can preserve area, shape, distance and direction at once, that is a theorem, not a limitation of the software. Every projection here gives up at least one of those, and switching between them is the fastest way to see what each one costs.

The globe is the honest one: an orthographic view with no distortion at the centre, showing you a little under half the planet at a time and shrinking everything toward the rim. Drag it and countries change shape as they rotate, because that is what a sphere does to a flat screen.

Mercator is the projection almost every web map uses. It preserves angles, which is why it won at navigation, and it pays for that by inflating area with latitude, Greenland arrives looking about the size of Africa when it is roughly a fourteenth of it. Useful to recognise, misleading to reason from.

Robinson and Equal Earth are the two compromises. Robinson distorts everything slightly so nothing is distorted badly, which is why atlases favoured it for decades. Equal Earth keeps area true, every country covers its correct share of the map, and absorbs the error into shape instead, gently bending outlines near the poles. If you want to compare how big two countries actually are, use that one.

The land comes from Natural Earth's public-domain vector data, simplified enough to stay quick on a phone. 198 countries and territories are clickable; the map also draws disputed areas as dashed outlines where the source marks them that way. Micro-states too small to hit with a finger get a marker instead of an outline, so Monaco and Vatican City stay reachable.

Each one opens a dossier with the story behind its flag, why its capital holds the role, a few facts worth knowing, and a map of the country among the countries that border it.

Nothing here is authoritative on borders. It is a game's reference map, drawn from one dataset, and where that dataset makes a call on contested territory it is that dataset's call and not a position of ours.