Daily Borders Quiz

Five rounds. Each one names three countries and asks which country touches all of them. It is the only game here that asks you to reason rather than recall: you are never shown the answer in any form, only what surrounds it, and you work inwards.

The three wrong options are never random. Each one borders at least one of the countries shown, so every candidate is in roughly the right part of the world and none can be eliminated on sight. Any country the clues would also correctly describe is filtered out, so there is exactly one right answer every time.

The pool is the 113 countries with at least three land neighbours. Below that the puzzle stops working: two neighbours rarely narrow the field to a single country, and island nations have nothing to go on at all.

The countries with the most neighbours are the ones this game returns to most often. China and Russia border fourteen each, Brazil ten, Germany nine. Those are also the easiest rounds once you know them, because a set of three neighbours that includes, say, Mongolia and North Korea has only one possible answer. The hard rounds are the middle of a crowded continent, where four or five countries all touch the same neighbours and only one touches all three of the ones shown.

The five rounds are the same for everyone and rotate at local midnight. Endless mode is here, and every dossier draws a map of the country among its neighbours.