Endless Starter Capital Quiz
▸ABOUT THIS GAME
the starter pool capital cities 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. 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.
Endless deals from 67 widely recognised countries, and a full pass meets every one of them. 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 draws from a shuffled bag, so you meet every one of the 67 answers before any repeats. At one a day the daily would take 67 days to cover the same ground, roughly 2.2 months. Endless does it in a sitting, which makes it the mode to drill in and the fastest way to turn the half of the pool you are guessing at into the half you know.
Endless has no schedule and no streak, so you can spend guesses testing a hunch. Nothing is recorded against a date, so a bad run costs nothing. The board reshuffles as soon as you finish one, and the bag carries on from where it was, so a long session keeps covering new capital cities. 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.