Endless Locate Quiz

Five countries. Hover to highlight, click to select, and confirm when you're sure. You either found it or you didn't, and a miss shows you both what you picked and where the answer actually was, with the distance between them.

This is the one game here you can play without already knowing every country by name. The other six ask you to produce an answer; this one asks you to point, which is a far lower bar and a much better way in if the archive still feels like a wall.

Zoom with ⌘ or Ctrl and the scroll wheel, or pinch on a touchscreen, and drag to pan. Plain scrolling still scrolls the page, so the map never traps you. Zoom in when a country is small or crowded by its neighbours; the highlight tells you exactly what you are about to select before you commit to it.

The map is fully keyboard operable: tab to it, move the crosshair with the arrow keys, hold shift for finer steps, press Enter to select, plus and minus to zoom, zero to reset. That said, this game asks you to find something by looking at it, so it will not work well with a screen reader. If you are playing without sight, the flag trap and borders games, and all six of the main games, are ordinary lists of buttons and work properly.

Every country on file is clickable, including its overseas territories, which count as the country they belong to. Targets are drawn from the 168 countries larger than 5,000 km²: Vatican City spans a hundredth of a degree, and asking someone to hit that would test their mouse rather than their map.

The map is drawn in Equal Earth, so every country covers its true share of the world. That matters more here than in any other game: on the Mercator projection most people picture, Greenland looks the size of Africa and Europe looks larger than South America, which is exactly the intuition this game is trying to correct. Targets are drawn at random, so you can keep going as long as you like. Today's five is over here, and the interactive map is the place to study.