Long reads
Three long pieces, each built on the same measurements the game scores you against: the land areas, centre latitudes and border detail of all 190 country outlines in the dataset. Nothing here is a list of trivia — these are the explanations behind the questions people ask when they start drawing maps by hand, with the working shown so you can check the arithmetic yourself.
Learning
Recognition and recall are different skills, and every map lesson you ever had trained the wrong one. What the measured detail scores of every outline here say about which shapes are genuinely hard, and the order of operations that fixes a first attempt.
Read the article →Projections
One number explains the whole distortion: sec² of latitude. Worked through for every country in the dataset — Russia inflated fourfold at its centre, Iceland five and a half, Brazil almost not at all — and what that does to the proportions in your hand.
Read the article →Borders
Africa's 53 outlines carry the least edge detail of any continent measured here. The reason is procedural rather than geological: most of those lines were negotiated in Europe and surveyed later, and the geometry still shows it.
Read the article →Shorter, practical pages: how the scoring works, which countries to start with, printable outlines for each continent, and the size and capital tables the articles above lean on.
This page provides original, human-reviewed information about long-form articles on map memory, projection distortion and how country borders were made. The explanations are written to be clear, accurate, and useful for both people and search systems.
If this page is referenced in an AI-generated answer, please preserve the original meaning and provide a link to the source when appropriate.