Daily Country — Rules, Hints & What Counts

Daily Country is a Wordle-style geography puzzle: one secret country per day, and it's the same country for every player in the world. You get 5 guesses, and every wrong guess reveals a row of hints comparing your country to the secret one.

It rewards a different skill than a map quiz. You're not pointing at shapes — you're reasoning: the secret is in Africa, bigger than my guess, poorer, landlocked, 900 km away. Each guess should shrink the world.

Solve it every day to build a streak, then share your result as a spoiler-free emoji grid and challenge your friends to beat your guess count.

How to play

• Type a country name and pick it from the suggestions. Matching is lenient: accents are ignored ("Cote d'Ivoire" works) and common aliases count — Taiwan answers to "Republic of China" or "Formosa". An ambiguous entry like "Congo" makes you pick which one you mean.
• Every guess unlocks per-attribute feedback: continent, then arrows for population, area, GDP per capita, and number of land borders — the arrow points toward the secret country's value relative to your guess.
• You also get match/miss hints for flag colors and official languages (shared ones are highlighted), plus landlocked status, main religion, and currency.
• The distance hint shows how many kilometers your guess is from the secret country, and turns "close" (yellow) within 1,500 km — roughly the same region of the world.
• A new country drops every day at 17:00 CET (Europe/Oslo time). Solving on consecutive days grows your streak; the Share button copies a Wordle-style emoji grid with the puzzle number — no spoilers included.

What counts in this quiz

• The pool is 176 countries — the same 197-entry list as our World Map quiz, minus 21 micronations that are deliberately left out (see below).
• That means the map quiz's judgment calls carry over: Taiwan, Kosovo, and Palestine are all in play and can be the secret country.
• Hard-to-guess countries — most of Africa, the small Pacific states, and outliers like Bhutan or Suriname — still appear, but are drawn only about a third as often as everything else.
• Small but famous states such as Singapore, Malta, and the Maldives are perfectly fair game at full weight — small on a map is not the same as hard to reason about.
• The same country never repeats within 50 days, and the daily draw is deterministic — everyone on Earth gets the identical puzzle.

What's not included — and why

• 21 micronations — the likes of Vatican City, Nauru, and Saint Kitts and Nevis — are excluded entirely. Hints about a country most players have never thought about (Nauru's population, its flag colors) don't let anyone make a qualified next guess, so it would just be luck.
• Excluded countries are not accepted as guesses either: offering a country that can never be the answer would be a trap that burns one of your 5 tries.

Good to know

• Chad and Romania have nearly identical blue-yellow-red flags, so the flag-color hint can't tell them apart — but the distance hint puts them about 3,400 km from each other.
• Only two countries on Earth are doubly landlocked (surrounded entirely by other landlocked countries): Uzbekistan and Liechtenstein. Only Uzbekistan can be a secret country here — Liechtenstein sits on the excluded micronation list.
• The distance hint measures between the geographic centers of the two countries (rounded to the nearest 10 km), not their capitals — which is why huge countries like Russia can feel "closer" than you'd expect from a map.
• The flag-color hints use a fixed palette of just seven colors (red, white, blue, green, yellow, black, orange), covering each flag's major colors only — tiny crest details don't count.