Guide
How to draw a country from memory
Most people are much worse at this than they expect, and the reason is almost never a shaky hand — it is drawing detail before proportion. This guide covers the order of operations that actually raises scores, plus what the accuracy number is measuring so you know what to optimise for.
The five steps, in order
- 01
Fix the proportion before anything else
Decide one thing before your pen moves: is this country wider than it is tall, taller than wide, or roughly square? Because scoring compares filled area, a correctly-proportioned rough blob beats a beautifully detailed shape that is 30% too short. This single decision is worth more points than every coastline detail combined.
- 02
Find an anchor you actually remember
Nobody recalls a whole border at once, but everyone remembers one feature: the straight line across the Sahara, the boot of Italy, the horn of Brazil, the tapering tip of South America. Start there, draw outward in both directions, and let the shape close itself.
- 03
Draw in one continuous stroke where you can
Lifting the pen mid-border creates gaps, and a gap means the fill leaks in unpredictable ways. One stroke that returns to its start scores far more reliably than four careful segments that never quite meet.
- 04
Ignore the small islands
Scoring measures overlapping area. A dozen tiny islets contribute almost nothing, while the mainland silhouette contributes nearly everything. Spend your attention where the area is — even for archipelagos, get the biggest island right first.
- 05
Read the sector grid, then immediately redraw
After you submit, a 3x3 grid shows coverage per region and names the sector you under-drew. This is the actual learning loop: people who redraw straight away typically gain 10 to 20 points on the second attempt, because the feedback is specific rather than a bare score.
Four mistakes that cost the most points
Drawing too small
Position and size are normalised away before scoring, so a big sketch costs you nothing and gives you far finer control over the coastline. Use the whole canvas.
Starting with detail
Detail added to a wrongly-proportioned outline is wasted. Establish the footprint, then refine inward — never the other way round.
Leaving the shape open
An unclosed outline gets filled unpredictably, which can cost more points than a crude but closed shape. Always return to your starting point.
Chasing a perfect coastline
Real borders are fractal — Norway's coast has more detail than any hand can draw. Approximate the outer envelope and accept it. Even experts cap out around 80 on hard countries.
How the accuracy score is calculated
Your strokes and the real border are both scaled and centred into an identical bounding box, then filled and rasterised onto the same grid. The headline number is intersection-over-union: the pixels where both shapes agree, divided by the pixels either shape covers. That is why drawing off-centre or at the wrong size never costs you anything, and why over-drawing hurts as much as under-drawing — extra area counts against the union just like missing area does.
Alongside the score you get two secondary figures. Matched is how much of the real country you covered, and over-drawn is how much of your shape sat outside the real border. A high matched figure with a high over-drawn figure means you drew a bloated version of the right shape — usually the easiest thing to fix.
Aspect ratio is deliberately not normalised. Stretching your sketch to fit would erase the very thing being tested: whether you remember that Chile is long and thin, or that Mongolia is wide and shallow.
Good countries to practise on first
Simple borders let you feel how the scoring responds before you take on a coastline that fights back.