Guide
How to Play Guess a Country
One country is hidden each day. You have 6 guesses to work out which one, using the distance, direction and proximity clues the game gives you after every attempt.
What Is Guess a Country?
Guess a Country is a daily geography guessing game. Instead of guessing letters, you guess whole countries. A single country is chosen for the day, its map outline is shown, and your job is to name it before you run out of attempts.
It plays like a word puzzle for geography fans. The same puzzle is served to every player worldwide, which means a score is only meaningful if you can compare it with other people solving the identical question.
How to Start the Game
- Open the game on the homepage. Today's puzzle loads automatically, and your progress is saved in the browser as you play.
- Type any country name into the search box. Suggestions appear as you type, and you can also scroll and select with the arrow keys.
- Press the guess button or hit Enter to submit.
What Each Part of the Screen Does
The daily game is a single screen, and every element on it exists for one reason:
- The search box accepts any country in the game's dataset, with suggestions as you type. If a country does not appear in the suggestions, it is not in the dataset, so do not spend time second-guessing the spelling of an unlisted territory.
- Each guess card shows the country you tried, a colour and bar for proximity, a compass arrow, and the distance in kilometres. Reading these together is the whole game — the sections below explain each one.
- The hint button offers optional extra clues, described below.
- The countdown shows how long until the next puzzle at midnight UTC.
- The stats button opens your solve distribution, win rate and streaks, all stored in your browser.
How Many Guesses Do You Get?
You get 6 guesses per daily puzzle. Solving the country ends the game immediately and records the number of attempts you used. If you run out of guesses, the correct country is revealed and your streak resets.
In unlimited mode the same 6 guesses apply, but there is no daily limit and nothing you do there affects your streak or statistics.
How the Clues Work
Each guess reveals three clues. Taken together they are far more informative than any one of them alone, which is why guessing a sequence of large countries is usually the fastest route to an answer.
What the Colours Mean
The border colour and the small progress bar on each guess card show your proximity: how close your guess was to the answer, expressed as a percentage. The closer you get, the stronger the colour. A wider bar means you are geographically nearer than your previous attempt.
What the Arrows Mean
The arrow points from your guess towards the hidden country, using the eight compass points: N, NE, E, SE, S, SW, W and NW. A target icon means you guessed the correct country.
This is the most useful clue in the game. If you guess Brazil and the arrow points north-west, the answer is somewhere north-west of Brazil, not south-east.
How Distance Works
Distance is the great-circle distance between the two countries' coordinates, measured in kilometres. It is displayed alongside the arrow for each guess.
How the Hints Work
The Get Hint button under the search box reveals extra clues one at a time, in a fixed order. Hint one names the capital and continent. Hint two gives the population. Hint three gives the first letter of the country's name and one bordering country.
Hints are free: using one never costs a guess and never affects your statistics, so there is no penalty for using all three on a puzzle that has stumped you. The catch is that each hint narrows your thinking as well as the answer — a population figure or a first letter will steer you hard towards a guess, and once you have seen it, the distance-only route is much harder to reconstruct. Players who want the pure puzzle tend to leave hints alone until they are genuinely stuck.
What Happens When You Finish
Solving the puzzle ends the round immediately, records how many guesses you used, and adds one day to your streak. Failing uses all 6 guesses, reveals the answer, and resets the streak to zero — but your solve history and statistics survive, so one bad day does not erase the record of the good ones.
How to Win
Name the hidden country before your guesses run out. Because the game records how many attempts you needed, a strong result is a low number, and sharing that number is how players compare progress with friends.
If you want the analytical approach rather than trial and error, the country guessing strategy guide shows how to convert each clue into a smaller candidate list, and the methodology page sets out the rules behind the puzzle itself — how the daily country is chosen and how distance, direction and proximity are calculated.
Daily Puzzle vs Unlimited Mode
The daily puzzle is the same for everyone and counts towards your statistics and streak. A new one appears at midnight UTC. Unlimited mode generates random countries on demand at three difficulty levels, so you can play as much as you like without affecting your record.
How the Streak Works
Your streak counts consecutive daily puzzles solved. Solving one adds a day; failing one resets it to zero. The number is shown in the header and in the statistics screen, and your best streak is recorded separately.
How to Share Your Result
After you solve a puzzle, the share dialog builds a summary of your guesses with no country names in it, so posting it never spoils the puzzle for anyone else. You can copy it, or send it straight to a social network.