Endless The Americas Capital Quiz

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

Two continents in one pack, because South America has only a dozen entries on file. It runs from the second-largest country in the world down to Caribbean islands of a few hundred square kilometres, so scale alone tells you a lot.

The Caribbean is the hard half. Two dozen small islands, many of them former colonies of the same handful of European powers, with flags that borrow from each other.

The pool is the 35 countries of The Americas. Only three 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 Ottawa in the far north to Montevideo 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 35 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.