[OC] How often can people find each country on a world map? 85,000 guesses from a geography game

[OC] How often can people find each country on a world map? 85,000 guesses from a geography game

Data: 84,845 guesses from borderline.world, a daily game I made where you find countries on a 3D globe. It covers 166 countries, minimum 184 attempts each, 12 June to 5 July 2026. Microstates and small island nations aren't in the game because they're too small to tap reliably on a globe so no Vatican, Monaco or Maldives here.

Method: a guess counts as correct when the tap lands inside the country's borders. Wrong answers aren't mis-clicks: the median wrong tap lands over 600 km from the target and 87% of them land inside a different country entirely, so the map is measuring where people genuinely think countries are.

Results: the five hardest are Timor-Leste (25%), Liberia (28%), Sierra Leone (31%), Burkina Faso (31%) and Senegal (32%), and West Africa is the hardest region as a block. The easiest are Brazil and Russia (98%), Australia and France (96%) and Canada (95%). One that surprised me Switzerland (63%) is far harder to place than Sweden (85%) even though the name mix-up famously runs both ways.

Tool: d3-geo with a Natural Earth projection, rendered to canvas.

Play it or poke at the data source: borderline.world

u/Two_Time — 11 hours ago

The countries people mix up the most, from a few thousand wrong guesses

I run a daily game where you find countries on a globe, and I pulled the data on which ones people most often place wrong, meaning they confidently tapped the wrong country. Some predictable, some not.

Most-confused (asked → what people actually tapped):

  • Brunei → Malaysia (it's basically embedded in Malaysian Borneo)
  • Guyana → Suriname (the Guianas blur together)
  • Turkmenistan → Uzbekistan (the stans, predictably)
  • Gambia → Senegal (Gambia is literally surrounded by it)
  • Zambia → Zimbabwe (similar name, neighbours)
  • Guinea → Sierra Leone
  • Slovakia ↔ Hungary (mixed up both directions)
  • Timor-Leste → Indonesia
  • Chad → Niger
  • Guyana → France (people reaching for French Guiana, I think)

The real outlier is Zambia. People didn't just miss it for one neighbour, they tapped Zimbabwe, Angola, Tanzania, DR Congo and Botswana for it. It seems to be the hardest country to actually place.

Is Zambia genuinely that hard, or is something about its shape and position throwing people off?

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u/Two_Time — 7 days ago