Endless Oceania Shape Quiz

Oceania country shapes 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. Three of them draw as a single unbroken landmass, which means the outline gives you one closed edge and nothing else; seven are scattered enough that the arrangement of the pieces is the clue. The most compact outline in the set is Nauru, smooth, rounded and genuinely hard, because a shape with no corners looks like a dozen others. The most convoluted is Maldives, which almost identifies itself. Between Australia and Tuvalu 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 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.