Endless Europe Shape Quiz

Europe country shapes 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. 35 of them draw as a single unbroken landmass, which means the outline gives you one closed edge and nothing else; zero are scattered enough that the arrangement of the pieces is the clue. The most compact outline in the set is North Macedonia, smooth, rounded and genuinely hard, because a shape with no corners looks like a dozen others. The most convoluted is Greece, which almost identifies itself. Between Russia and Vatican City 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 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.