Endless Africa Shape Quiz

Africa country shapes 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. 49 of them draw as a single unbroken landmass, which means the outline gives you one closed edge and nothing else; one are scattered enough that the arrangement of the pieces is the clue. The most compact outline in the set is Lesotho, smooth, rounded and genuinely hard, because a shape with no corners looks like a dozen others. The most convoluted is Cabo Verde, which almost identifies itself. Between DR Congo and São Tomé and Principe the pool spans several orders of magnitude of area, and the puzzle scales every outline to the same box, so size is exactly the cue you don't get.

A single territorial outline, stripped of colour, labels and any surrounding coastline. Name the country it belongs to. Big countries give themselves away; the small ones are where streaks go to die. 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 country shapes 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.