Endless Oceania Flag Quiz

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

The smallest pack, and the strangest. Almost every entry is an archipelago, so the shape round is less about one outline than about the pattern a scatter of islands makes. Several of these countries have more ocean territory than most continents have land.

Distances here are enormous and the land is tiny, so the compass hint matters more than in any other pack. Telling the Micronesian states apart is the last thing most players learn.

The pool is the 17 countries of Oceania, and the traps are measurable: two of those flags have at least one near-duplicate elsewhere in the set, the closest pair being Australia and New Zealand. Proportions help more than people expect, ten of the flags fly at 1:2, but there are six 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 17 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.