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Comment by amanzi | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand how this works? It had a picture of _____, and the correct answer was ______. Is it just guessing the country name based on the shape?

edit - hid my answer in case it wasn't as obvious to others.

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Todays question was super easy for a lot of people. Past countries have been things like Turks & Cacos, Liberia, Guatemala. Those I got close to and then the last guess or two I was scanning around google maps.

Yeah it’s not as fun as Wordle, kinda interesting for a few plays though.

Guatemala was surprisingly hard for me. I discovered I really have no idea what the countries in Central America actually look like. I got it by naming literally every single Central American country think of, and then thinking really hard which one I missed. Guatemala has an interesting border I won't easily forget anymore.

On the other hand, I got Nepal in one, which I'm unreasonably proud of.

I wonder if this was posted every day and only got upvoted when a country that is definitely in the top 5 easiest and virtually everyone will get it in one or two tries was on offer.

I wish the rotation would be on by default (the distances are enough of a hint), or at least work if I turn it on.

This happened exactly. It had 5 upvotes yesterday (Liberia).

It's almost as though it's a bad design to have it be one country per day!

My world geography is pretty good but there are still a lot of small countries that I'm going to be vague on their shapes, exact locations, and even current names.

Yep, that's why I was confused - seemed too easy to be fun. But I tried again today and it was much more difficult.

> s it just guessing the country name based on the shape

Yes, and you get hints on distance and direction when wrong.

How can you get it wrong, though? You are basically presented the solution. It's like if Wordle would show you the picture of a tiger and asks for the word "TIGER". And if you don't recognize a country by it's borders and just take a wild guess, something like "you are 5000km off!" probably won't help you much anyway, which is apparently what you are getting shown on a wrong guess according to comments here.

Not everyone knows the exact shape of every country.

The real problem is there's only 195 countries.

And some of them have VERY distinct shapes or locations.

In that case, it will be a good game for at least 195 days

No, the problem is much worse than that. Wordle has you drawing from a pool of 12000 possible 5-letter words to guess from a pool of 2500 answers.

Compare this to drawing from 195 countries to guess 195 countries.

On a wrong guess, it tells you the distance and the direction.

There are a ton of countries and territories in places like Africa and the Pacific Ocean that many/most people don't know what they look like and have, at best, a vague notion of their location and may not even recall their name unaided.

oh, shoot. i assumed i was trying to guess an island nation since it wasn't rendered with any surroundings. but it renders all states this way — just the border, as if it had no neighbors?

That's right, and all scaled the same too, so you have no idea of the size.

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