About Guess the Country
Guess the Country is hangman with country names. A hidden name is shown as blanks along with the region it belongs to, and you guess one letter at a time. Solve it before you make six wrong guesses, then carry your score on to the next country.
How to play
- The hidden country is picked at random from 195 countries, and a hint above the blanks tells you its region.
- Each guess is a single letter. Every place that letter appears in the name is revealed.
- A letter that is not in the name costs one of your six lives. Six wrong letters ends the game and reveals the answer.
- Accents are ignored: an O guess fills the o in Cote d'Ivoire, and spaces, hyphens and apostrophes are shown for you.
- Solving a country scores 100 points plus 20 for each life you still have, so a clean solve is worth 220.
- After a solve, Next country keeps your score and streak. Losing a country ends the run, and Play again starts from zero.
Controls
- Type letters on a physical keyboard; any A to Z key counts as a guess.
- Or click or tap the on-screen letter buttons. Used letters turn green if they were in the name and grey if not.
- Press Next country after a solve, or Play again after a loss.
Tips and strategy
- Use the region hint. Asia has many names ending in -stan, while Africa and Europe have a lot of names ending in A.
- Vowels are a safe opening: A appears in a large share of country names, and 74 of the 195 names in the game end in A.
- Count the blanks and the words. A three-word name with a short middle word is very often 'X and Y', such as Trinidad and Tobago or Antigua and Barbuda.
- Once a few letters are showing, list every country in that region that fits the pattern before guessing again, and pick a letter that splits them.
- Lives are worth 20 points each on a solve, so it pays to stop guessing broadly and commit once you are fairly sure of the name.
Background
Hangman is an old pencil-and-paper word game. It was recorded in Britain in the late nineteenth century, and Alice Bertha Gomme's 1894 collection of traditional games describes an early version called 'Birds, Beasts and Fishes', in which players guessed the name of an animal letter by letter. Country names make a good word list because they mix very short names such as Chad, Mali and Peru with long multi-word names, and because the regional hint narrows a list of 195 down to between 14 (Oceania) and 54 (Africa) candidates.
Questions
- Is there a time limit?
- No. You can think for as long as you like between letters.
- When is my best score saved?
- Every time you solve a country, your running total is compared with your best and stored in your browser if it is higher.
- Do I need to type accented letters?
- No. Letters are compared without accents, so plain A to Z keys cover every name, including Sao Tome and Principe.