A small guide to a slightly wrong world.

One country or territory is missing. Find it in five guesses.

Missing Country or Territory

One of 252 countries and territories has disappeared, islands and all. Explore the whole world, then name the missing place in five guesses. Antarctica stays visible but is never an answer. Country names stay hidden until you guess them. England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland are separate answers; the United Kingdom is not an answer.

1. Start typing a name. Suggestions appear alphabetically after the first character and include common aliases. Click a suggestion to select it, then press Guess. Case, accents, and extra spaces do not matter.

2. Each wrong country stays colored on the map. Dark red means very close; white means far away. The scale is the same every round: dark red at 0 km, red at 1,000 km, pale red at 5,000 km, and white at 15,000 km or more.

3. The distance is approximately the shortest separation between the places’ mapped borders or coastlines, including overseas components. Neighbors can be 0 km apart without being the answer. Select a history entry to inspect that guessed country.

4. Find the answer within five valid, distinct guesses to win. Invalid names, ambiguous names, and repeated guesses do not cost an attempt. After a win or five misses, the missing place returns to the map. Share your score without revealing the answer.

Use arrows to navigate suggestions; Enter selects a highlighted name. Once selected, Enter again submits it. With the map focused, arrows pan, Shift + arrows pan farther, + and − zoom, and 0 resets. Drag, pinch, zoom buttons, or Ctrl/Command + scroll also explore the map. Tiny territories count: you can zoom up to 8,192×.

Practice shuffles all selectable places and skips today’s daily answer when starting a round. You won’t repeat an available place until the collection has been exhausted.

Learn something, win or lose

Every completed round reveals one carefully chosen fact with a link to its source. Discover unusual wildlife, remarkable places, inventions, and surprising history: each of the 252 countries and territories has its own short discovery, whether you win or lose.

Where a place’s status needs context, the result also explains why it is a separate answer. The collection includes sovereign states, dependencies, self-governing regions, and grouped islands. For example, Crown Dependencies are outside the UK, the Caribbean Netherlands belongs to the Netherlands, and Svalbard and Jan Mayen share a statistical code despite having different administrations. A separate answer does not imply independent statehood. Disputed areas follow Natural Earth’s map policy.

A new discovery, every day

The daily puzzle resets at 00:00 UTC for everyone. An unfinished puzzle keeps its original date even when finished after midnight. Only daily wins extend your streak; practice never affects it. Your statistics include win rate and guess distribution.

Your progress stays here

Your browser saves progress and statistics on this device without an account. Clearing site data removes those records. Saves do not automatically move to another browser, device, or website address. If storage is blocked, you can still play for the current visit.

Room to play

Advertising is currently disabled. If introduced, display ads will be separated from controls. Fullscreen ads will only be eligible after you choose Next puzzle in practice, after at least three completions and five minutes, with a maximum of two in 30 minutes. Daily play will stay uninterrupted.