About Guess a Country

What This Site Is

Guess a Country takes one idea from word puzzles and applies it to geography. Instead of guessing letters, you guess countries, and instead of learning which letters appear, you learn that the answer is 2,400 kilometres north-east of your last attempt. The puzzle is the same for every player on a given day and changes at midnight UTC.

It is built to be picked up in a minute. There is no account, no sign-up, no email and no advertising. Your progress is stored in your own browser and is never uploaded to us. The only outside service involved is Google Analytics, which loads only if you allow it ? see the privacy page for the detail.

Who We Are

Guess a Country is built and run by a small independent team of geography-puzzle players. We built the game, we maintain the country dataset behind it, and we play the daily puzzle ourselves — badly on some days, in two guesses on the good ones. Everything on this site, from the rules page to the strategy guides, is written by that same team.

We are not a content farm and we do not publish outsourced articles. The guides here exist because we kept seeing players lose puzzles in the same handful of ways, and writing down what actually works seemed more useful than another list of generic “top tips”.

How We Write and Review Our Content

Every guide on this site is written from actual play. When we recommend an opening guess, it is because we have watched it work — and fail — across many rounds, not because it sounds authoritative. When we give a number we have marked it as approximate unless it comes directly from the game's own logic.

Each page is re-checked whenever the game or its dataset changes, so the advice never drifts away from how the game really behaves. Pages carry a last-reviewed date at the foot, and we would rather leave a page short and true than pad it out.

Where the Facts Come From

The dataset contains 233 countries, each with a capital, a population, a continent, coordinates and a map outline. Every one of them has capital data, and the outlines are real country shapes rather than placeholders. Each date is converted into a fixed index into a frozen list, so the puzzle a player sees today is identical for everyone and never changes once the day is over.

After every guess the game reports the great-circle distance between the two countries, a compass bearing pointing towards the answer, and a proximity percentage comparing your attempt with your previous ones. That is enough to solve the puzzle by reasoning alone, which is what the strategy guide covers.

Accuracy and Its Limits

Facts shown on answer pages, such as capital, population, continent and neighbours, are read directly from the same dataset that drives the game. They are therefore always consistent with the clues you were given, and they reflect the dataset rather than any live external source.

That is a deliberate trade, and it is worth being honest about the limitation: populations change, borders occasionally do, and a fixed snapshot will slowly drift from the real world. Where a value is missing it is shown as not recorded instead of being estimated, and figures should be read as recorded values rather than breaking news. For most geography trivia the difference is small; when it is not, we fix the dataset rather than the wording.

What Is Not Stored

There is no user account system and no server-side player data. Statistics, streaks and the current puzzle are kept in your browser's local storage, which means clearing site data resets them. This is a deliberate trade: the game stays private and free, and in exchange your history does not follow you to another device.

Corrections

Mistakes on a geography site are worth fixing quickly, so corrections are treated as first-class work. When someone flags a wrong fact, we check it against the dataset, correct the dataset itself if it is at fault, and the fix then appears on every page that reads from it — not just the one that was reported. Advice that turns out to be wrong in practice gets rewritten, not quietly deleted.

Languages

The site is in English throughout — the interface, the guess list, the clue directions and the puzzle content, including capital and continent names.

Feedback

Bug reports and suggestions are welcome. If a puzzle is unsolvable within the guess limit, or a fact on an answer page looks wrong, that is a genuine defect worth knowing about — a geography game is only as good as its facts.

Start Playing

Read the rules and clue explanations, jump straight into unlimited play, or check the methodology for exactly how the puzzle and its clues work. We also publish a privacy page and terms of use, both written in the same plain language as the rest of the site.