Endless The Americas Flag Quiz

The Americas flags 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, and the traps are measurable: nine of those flags have at least one near-duplicate elsewhere in the set, the closest pair being Bolivia and Ghana. Proportions help more than people expect, 13 of the flags fly at 2:3, but there are ten 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 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.