Endless Africa Capital Quiz

Africa capital citys back to back with no daily limit, dealt from a shuffled bag.

The largest pack on the site, and the one where the straight-line borders drawn at the Berlin Conference show up most clearly in the outlines. A lot of the continent's shapes are polygons rather than coastlines, which cuts both ways: they are hard to tell apart, but their corners are distinctive once you learn them.

The Sahel states are the usual sticking point, a row of wide shapes across the continent with little coast between them. The island nations off the east coast and the small West African states are where most streaks end.

The pool is the 53 countries of Africa. Only four of the capitals carry their own territory's name in some form, which makes those the free points; the rest are the round. The seats of government run from Tunis in the far north to Maseru in the far south, and because the hint after a wrong guess reports a compass direction, latitude is the axis you can triangulate on fastest.

One capital city name. Name the country it governs. Cities that share a name with their country are free points; the rest reward knowing your Central Asia from your Caucasus. You get 6 guesses. Every wrong one returns the great-circle distance to the target, a compass direction pointing at it and a proximity percentage, so a cold start is recoverable, two well-spaced wrong guesses will usually bracket the answer.

Endless mode drops the once-a-day limit and deals continuously. It draws from a shuffled bag rather than picking at random, which matters more than it sounds: random sampling would hand you the same handful of easy capital citys repeatedly while never showing you others at all, whereas a bag guarantees you meet every one of the 53 answers before any repeats. That makes this the mode to drill in, the fastest way to turn the half of the pool you're guessing at into the half you know. Full rules, including how the distance and compass hints are calculated, are on the how-to-play page, and today's single scheduled puzzle is on the daily board.