Endless Starter Flag Quiz

the starter pool flags 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. The traps are measurable: 20 of those flags have at least one near-duplicate elsewhere in the set, the closest pair being Vietnam and Kyrgyzstan. Proportions help more than people expect, 34 of the flags fly at 2:3, but there are 15 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 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 flags. 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.