Endless Starter Shape Quiz

the starter pool country shapes 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. 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.

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 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.