Endless The Americas Shape Quiz

The Americas country shapes 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. 24 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 Uruguay, smooth, rounded and genuinely hard, because a shape with no corners looks like a dozen others. The most convoluted is Canada, which almost identifies itself. Between Canada and Saint Kitts and Nevis 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 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.