Daily Starter Shape Quiz

Today's mystery country shape from the starter pool, the same one for every player until local midnight.

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.

Today's answer is drawn from 67 widely recognised countries. 46 of them draw as a single unbroken landmass, which means the outline gives you one closed edge and nothing else; two are scattered enough that the arrangement of the pieces is the clue. The most compact outline in the set is Singapore, smooth, rounded and genuinely hard, because a shape with no corners looks like a dozen others. The most convoluted is Indonesia, which almost identifies itself. Between Russia and Singapore 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.

One country shape a day, on a fixed schedule, means the pool turns over slowly: 67 answers is 67 days before today's could come round again, roughly 2.2 months. The slowness is the point. There is one attempt, the result stands, and a streak is worth something precisely because it cannot be re-rolled. It also means the daily is a poor way to learn the pool and a good way to find out whether you already have.

Every player anywhere gets the same country shape on the same date, rotating at your local midnight, so everyone's results compare directly. Six guesses, then the answer, then a share card recording how many it took. Progress and streaks live on your own device, so clearing site data clears them. Full rules, including how the distance and compass hints are calculated, are on the how-to-play page. If you've already played today, endless mode has no limit.