Endless Africa Flag Quiz

Africa flags 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, and the traps are measurable: eight of those flags have at least one near-duplicate elsewhere in the set, the closest pair being Egypt and Yemen. Proportions help more than people expect, 35 of the flags fly at 2:3, but there are eight distinct ratios in play, so an unusually long or unusually square flag has already narrowed itself down before you look at the colours.

One national flag, no caption. Name the country that flies it. Similar tricolours and Pacific ensigns are the usual trap, the distance readout on a wrong guess tells you which hemisphere you're wrong in. 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 flags 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.