The country drawing game
Draw a country from memory. Get scored on the real border.
Four modes, 190 countries, no account. Your score is intersection-over-union against the real border, with position and size normalised away.
Today's country · everyone gets the same one
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One country a day, same for everyone.
Pick a country to draw from memory
Practice mode searches all 190 outlines. Each country also has its own page with the measured detail score, the piece count and the part of the border that decides your result. Twelve to start with:
How to score higher
Start at the most recognisable corner — a cape, a river mouth, a straight colonial border — and work outward from there.
Get the overall proportions right before any detail. A correctly-proportioned blob beats a detailed shape of the wrong height.
Small islands barely move your score. Spend your effort on the mainland silhouette.
Position and size are normalised away, so draw big. A larger sketch gives you finer control over the coastline.
What the modes do
- Daily challenge
- One country per UTC day, identical for every player, and the only mode that feeds the daily leaderboard.
- Practice
- Search all 190 countries and draw whichever one you want, as often as you want.
- Trace · beginner
- A dashed guide sits under your pen. Useful for learning a shape before trying it from memory.
- Endless
- Random well-known countries back to back, tracking a streak and a running average.
All 190 outlines, by continent
Nothing is locked behind a pack or an account: practice mode searches the whole set, and the counts below are exactly what it offers. The tiers are not evenly spread, and that is worth knowing before you pick a sheet. 23 of 53 African countries are rated easy, because colonial borders left long straight lines across the Sahara — while 10 of 14 Oceanian shapes are rated hard, because an archipelago falls into separate pieces and every piece costs you detail score. Asia and Europe hold the largest absolute number of hard borders; South America is the smallest sheet and the quickest one to finish.
| Continent | Countries | Easy | Medium | Hard |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Africa | 53 | 23 | 24 | 6 |
| Asia | 45 | 11 | 16 | 18 |
| Europe | 44 | 17 | 16 | 11 |
| North America | 22 | 8 | 5 | 9 |
| Oceania | 14 | 2 | 2 | 10 |
| South America | 12 | 4 | 5 | 3 |
What happens when you press submit
Your stroke is scaled into the same box as the real outline before anything is compared, which is why drawing small or off-centre costs you nothing — only the shape is judged. The headline number is the share of the combined area both shapes cover, so a sketch that bulges outside the border loses points exactly the way one that leaves part of the country uncovered does. The outline it is measured against is the same Natural Earth geometry as the rest of the site, drawn at the resolution the game fills.
Under that number the panel splits the difference in two: what you missed is the land the real border holds that your stroke never reached, and what you added is the part of your sketch that falls outside it. The distinction matters more than the score. A 70 with a little extra is a steady-hand problem you can fix on the next attempt; a 70 that missed a third of the country is a shape you have never actually seen, and no amount of redrawing helps until you look at it. The nine-box grid underneath names the compass sector that went wrongest, so the five-step method has something concrete to aim at, and a second attempt on the same country usually gains ten points or more.
When the game is not the right tool
Drawing one country at a time tells you how you did, not what you are missing. For that, label a whole sheet in one sitting and mark what you could not place — every map below is built from the same outlines the scorer uses, unlabeled, free to print, with an answer key on the page. The ranked lists work the same way sideways: easiest borders and hardest are both sorted by the measured detail score, while area, smallest and capitals give you the size ordering that makes a continent fall into place. Every shape is also reachable by name from the full index.