The countries of the world game
Countries is MapFinder's race. There is no score. The game names a country, you click it on the globe, and the clock runs until you have found the whole world. The countries you find stay painted on the planet behind you.
Pick a continent if the whole world is too much for one sitting.
How a run works
One card carries the entire run: the country being asked for, the counter, the stopwatch and a progress bar. It never moves and never re-announces itself. The heading just changes in place, because 160 arrival animations is 159 too many.
Click the right country and it fills in green. Miss, and the country you actually hit flashes back at you and the prompt stays. Miss enough times and the game rings the answer rather than leaving you stuck, but the country will be painted a colour that remembers that.
- Green. Found on the first click.
- Amber. Found, but it took a wrong guess or two.
- Rose. The game had to show you.
By the end the globe is your scoreboard. A planet painted mostly green with a rose scar across the Sahel tells you exactly what to study, without a results table saying so.
Two boards, because they are different races
The default run is the 161 countries a click can actually land on. The island microstates are left out on purpose: hunting for Tuvalu at the pixel level is a different skill from knowing where Chad is, and mixing the two makes the clock measure your mouse instead of your geography.
“Play with islands” turns on the full roster of 195, which is the UN’s 193 member states plus Palestine and Kosovo. Each board keeps its own best time, because beating 161 is not the same achievement as beating 195.
How long each run actually is
Before a run starts you can narrow the board to the continents you want. Everything begins selected, so pressing Start without touching anything gives you the whole world. Every control on that screen only ever takes countries away.
| Board | Countries | With islands on |
|---|---|---|
| Africa | 49 | 54 |
| Asia | 44 | 48 |
| Europe | 39 | 44 |
| North America | 14 | 23 |
| South America | 12 | 12 |
| Oceania | 3 | 14 |
| The whole world | 161 | 195 |
The islands toggle barely moves Africa or Europe and completely changes Oceania, which is three countries by default (Australia, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea) and fourteen with islands on. North America is the other one to watch: nine of its twenty-three are Caribbean island states, so the default board there is essentially the mainland.
Africa alone is the single best hour of geography study in the game. Europe is where most people discover the Balkans are not where they thought. A continent run keeps its own record, so you can chase Europe under four minutes without ever attempting the planet.
The clusters that cost you time
A world run is not 161 equally hard clicks. Most of the clock goes on six places where small countries sit shoulder to shoulder, and each of them has an order that makes the whole group easier to hold.
- The West African coast. West to east along the water: Senegal (with Gambia inside it), Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria. Togo and Benin are the two thin ones between Ghana and Nigeria, Togo first.
- The Sahel above it. Same direction: Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad. Burkina Faso is the small one tucked under Mali, and Niger is the one that reaches furthest east.
- The Balkans. Down the Adriatic: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania, with Serbia, Kosovo and North Macedonia inland behind them. Bosnia is the one with barely any coast, and Montenegro is directly below it.
- Central Asia. Kazakhstan is the enormous one on top. Uzbekistan is in the middle, Turkmenistan is on the Caspian, and Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan are the small mountainous pair to the east, Kyrgyzstan on top.
- The Gulf. Around the coast: Kuwait at the head, then Bahrain, Qatar as the thumb, the United Arab Emirates, and Oman on the corner.
- Central America. Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama. El Salvador is the only one with no Caribbean coast, which is the fastest way to tell it from Honduras.
The other reliable time sink is the Congo pair. The Republic of the Congo is the smaller one on the west bank, with Brazzaville on it, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo is everything else.
The fix-up round
When a run ends with countries in amber or rose, the game offers a second pass over just those, hardest first, with the rest of the world left painted exactly as you earned it.
A fix-up round deliberately sets no record. Forty countries cannot hold the best time for 165, and the point of it is repair rather than another race.
Borders are visible during a run
Country outlines are drawn only in this mode, streamed at the zoom you are looking at. In capitals mode a bright border would point your eye at the one place nothing happened. Here you are choosing between countries, so the seams are the information.