Endless Starter Capital Quiz

the starter pool capital citys back to back with no daily limit, dealt from a shuffled bag.

The starter pool is a hand-picked set of countries most people have already seen on a map, spread across every region rather than simply being the largest. It exists because the full archive is 198 entries deep, which is a punishing place to begin.

Nothing here is derived from population or area: ranking by size would have put several countries almost nobody could place into the beginner pool while leaving out Switzerland, Portugal and Iceland.

The pool is 67 widely recognised countries. Only two of the capitals carry their own territory's name in some form, which makes those the free points; the rest are the round. The seats of government run from Reykjavík in the far north to Wellington in the far south, and because the hint after a wrong guess reports a compass direction, latitude is the axis you can triangulate on fastest.

One capital city name. Name the country it governs. Cities that share a name with their country are free points; the rest reward knowing your Central Asia from your Caucasus. 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 capital citys repeatedly while never showing you others at all, whereas a bag guarantees you meet every one of the 67 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.