Endless Europe Flag Quiz

Europe flags back to back with no daily limit, dealt from a shuffled bag.

The densest pack: 45 countries in the smallest area of any region here, including most of the world's micro-states. Outlines come small and detailed rather than large and smooth, so the shape round rewards knowing coastlines.

The Balkans carry this pack. Half a dozen countries of similar size and similar shape sharing a peninsula, several of which changed borders within living memory.

The pool is the 45 countries of Europe, and the traps are measurable: 13 of those flags have at least one near-duplicate elsewhere in the set, the closest pair being Romania and Chad. Proportions help more than people expect, 14 of the flags fly at 2:3, but there are 15 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 45 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.