About Atlas Chain
Atlas Chain is the old road-trip word game played against the computer. You and the CPU take turns naming countries, and each new country must start with the last letter of the one before. You have 20 seconds per turn, and no country can be used twice.
How to play
- You start the chain with any country. After that, every country must begin with the last letter of the previous one, for example Kenya, then Algeria, then Afghanistan.
- Type the name and press Go or Enter. It must match a name on the game's list of 195 countries; accents, spaces and capital letters do not matter, but aliases such as USA are not accepted.
- A country that has already been used, by you or the CPU, is rejected. So is a name starting with the wrong letter. A rejected entry does not cost you the game, but the clock keeps running.
- You have 20 seconds on each of your turns. The clock resets after the CPU replies and does not run while the CPU is thinking.
- If your time runs out, you lose. If the CPU cannot find an unused country starting with the right letter, you win.
- Your score is the number of countries you named, plus a 5-point bonus if you stumped the CPU.
Controls
- Type in the box and press Enter or click Go.
- Your countries are shown in blue and the CPU's in red, in order, so you can see what has been used.
- Press Play again after the game ends to start a new chain.
Tips and strategy
- Letter A is the bottleneck. In the game's list 74 of the 195 names end in A but only 11 start with A, so A-starting countries run out quickly. Save some for later.
- To beat the CPU, aim for letters with very few starting countries. Only Oman starts with O, only Qatar with Q and only Yemen with Y. Once those are used, a name ending in O, Q or Y (such as Mexico, Iraq or Germany) leaves the CPU with nothing.
- The trap works both ways. The CPU picks at random, so it can hand you a letter with no countries left, and then you can only wait for the clock to run out. Track which rare letters are still available.
- Use the official list names: Turkiye, Czechia, Holy See, Cabo Verde and DR Congo are what the game recognises.
- Keep a couple of safe answers in mind for common letters such as A, N and S so a busy turn does not eat your 20 seconds.
Background
Chain games where each word begins with the last letter of the previous one go by many names, including Geography and Atlas, and have long been played on car journeys and in classrooms. Country names make the game lopsided in an interesting way: endings are dominated by A, N, S and E, while some starting letters have only one country each. In the game's list no country starts with W or X, and none ends with those letters either, so they never come up.
Questions
- Is there a time limit?
- Yes, 20 seconds for each of your turns. The CPU takes a moment to answer, and your clock does not run while it is thinking.
- Does the CPU ever make mistakes?
- No. It picks a random unused country that starts with the right letter. The only way it loses is when no such country remains.
- Where is my best score saved?
- In your browser on this device. A win adds 5 to your count of countries before it is compared with your best.