Daily Atlas — Country Deduction

About this game

Daily Atlas gives you one country a day and six guesses to name it. You will not be told whether you are warm in the vague way a quiz means it. Every guess comes back with the exact distance to the answer, the compass direction to travel, and how close that puts you as a percentage — and those three things together are enough to find any country in the atlas whether or not you could have pointed to it on a map beforehand. That is the whole design. A geography quiz rewards what you already memorised and turns everyone else away in ten seconds. This is a deduction puzzle that happens to be made of countries: guess anywhere, read the distance and the arrow, and the second guess is already an informed one. Two good guesses usually put you inside a region; three usually put you on it. A compass above the board draws every guess as a line at its true bearing, with its length set by how far off you were. Watching five lines converge on the middle is the puzzle solving itself in front of you, and it is information the list of numbers contains but does not show. The country is the same for everyone, everywhere, on the same day, and it comes from a shuffled order rather than a random pick, so no country repeats until every one of them has had a turn. When you finish you get a grid of squares and arrows to share — no names, no distances, nothing that spoils it, and nothing that depends on speaking English.

Controls

Type a country name and press Guess. The box suggests names as you type.

Keyboard

• Type any part of a country's name; a unique prefix is enough.
• Enter submits the guess.

How to play

Find the day's country in six guesses. Every guess tells you how far away it is and which way to go.

Reading a guess

• The distance is the great-circle distance in kilometres from the country you named to the answer.
• The arrow points the way you would travel to get there, and the percentage is how close that leaves you.
• Green squares in the share grid track that percentage, not your guess order.

Deducing

• Open anywhere. The first distance and arrow already rule out most of the world.
• Two guesses from different directions narrow the answer to a small region, because only a few countries sit at both of those distances.
• The compass draws each guess as a line at its true bearing, so the answer is wherever the lines are pointing.

The day

• Everyone gets the same country on the same day, and no country repeats until every one has had a turn.
• The share grid gives away no names and no distances.

Read the full Daily Atlas — Country Deduction rules and strategy →