How to draw Croatia from memory

Three things that go wrong when people sketch Croatia

Each one is measured off the outline the game scores, not copied from a reference atlas: the proportions, the straight sections and the way the shape breaks into pieces are all properties of the coordinates your stroke gets compared against.

• Not one straight edge to anchor the shape

  The longest unbroken run in the whole outline is under 8% of the perimeter, and the coast folds back 1.61× on the smooth ring that would wrap it. Choose two deep inlets and one sharp promontory as anchors, and let everything between them stay approximate.

• It narrows sharply toward the south

  Measured across, the outline is 4.3× wider near its northern edge than near its southern one. A sketch that keeps the same width all the way down looks plausible and scores badly, because a missing taper is missing area.

• Croatia is close to square

  Width against height comes out at 1.16 to 1, so the shape neither runs away sideways nor stretches vertically. Set that box first: with a near-square country almost every lost point comes from the coast detail inside it, not the footprint.

Why Croatia is scored this way

Country Drawing does not compare your sketch to a picture of Croatia. It scales and centres both your stroke and the real border into the same box, fills them, and measures how much of the two shapes overlap relative to their combined area. That means you are never punished for drawing Croatia small, off to one side, or rotated slightly — only for getting the shape itself wrong. The nine-sector grid then splits the real border into a 3×3 mesh and reports coverage per cell, which is how it can tell you that you lost the whole coastline rather than just handing you a number.

Croatia by the numbers

Croatia covers 56,594 km², which makes it the 123rd largest of 190 countries in the game and the 25th largest in Europe. The capital is Zagreb at about 45°N, 16°E, and it sits in Southern Europe. It touches Bosnia and Herzegovina, Hungary, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia, and 100% of its area sits in one main landmass. The rest of the perimeter is water.

Next to Croatia: its land neighbours

Size is what the outline has to fill, so comparing the countries that share this border side by side is the fastest way to get the proportions into your head before you draw.

Croatia compared with its land neighbours: area, population, capital and the number of separate outlines the game fills

Country	Area	Population	Capital	Pieces	vs Croatia
Croatiathis page	56,594 km²	4.1 m	Zagreb	1	—
Bosnia and Herzegovina	51,209 km²	3.3 m	Sarajevo	1	0.9×
Hungary	93,028 km²	9.8 m	Budapest	1	1.64×
Montenegro	13,812 km²	622 k	Podgorica	1	0.24×
Serbia	88,361 km²	6.9 m	Belgrade	1	1.56×
Slovenia	20,273 km²	2.1 m	Ljubljana	1	0.36×

Draw these next

Countries near Croatia share border conventions and coastline styles, which makes them the most useful follow-up practice.

Working through one country at a time is slow. Take the blank map of europe and label the whole region from memory — it shows you which neighbours you have never actually seen.

Croatia drawing questions