The world rewards
the curious.

Twelve countries to call your own.

Every expedition begins with twelve randomly drawn countries. Together they form your empire, arranged in a stack in the order you’ll play them. Play the first country, then work through the stack as your expedition grows.

Find your country's strength.

A challenger is drawn from the rest of the world. You see its name and shape. Both countries’ figures and flags stay hidden until you play. The globe is pinned to your country during the choice. Choose the category where you think you have the edge. Higher wins in seven categories; for proximity to the equator, closer wins. After playing, compare both flags and all eight categories to see what else could have worked.

An unavailable category stays visible with an explanation. Only categories with reliable figures for both countries can be played. Identical displayed figures tie.

Win a country. Learn something.

Both values appear on a shared scale, with the source and year behind each number. Win, and the challenger becomes yours. Your played country moves to the back of the stack, followed by your new country.

Lose, and your played country returns to the world. You lose one of your four lives. A country you lose can turn up again, ready to be won back.

A tie makes the next round matter.

Your played country moves to the back of your stack and you keep your lives. The challenger becomes contested, outlined in gold on the globe. It does not count as yours yet. Your next win claims the challenger and every contested country. A loss releases them back into the world. Another tie adds to the stakes.

There is no extra penalty for losing contested countries. If no unclaimed challengers remain, all remaining contested countries join your empire.

Take your time. See how far you get.

There is no clock by default. You get four lives for the entire expedition. Each loss costs one life; lives never refill. Four losses end the game. Reach all 174 countries in the expedition to conquer the world.

Your progress and personal best are saved on the server and linked to this browser by a cookie. You can close the page and return to an unfinished expedition. An internet connection is needed to play. Older saved expeditions keep their original rules, including any life restoration.

A new daily challenge at midnight UTC.

Each daily difficulty deals ten random playable countries to its players in the same order, with ten shared main matchups. Standard and Hard have separate random draws. Finish with no more than two misses to win. A tie is safe and uses the same stack and contested-country rules. If round ten ties, extra rounds continue until a win claims the contested countries or a loss releases them. Extra player countries follow your own stack; challengers follow the shared order. If every fresh challenger ties, the contested countries are awarded and play ends.

Your third miss locks a daily loss, but you can keep playing to finish. There is one scored attempt per guest player or signed-in account, difficulty and UTC date, without retries. You can play both difficulties. Start before 00:00 UTC and finish by 01:00 UTC the next day; unfinished attempts then count as losses. The daily draw has no difficulty filtering, so success is not guaranteed.

Each difficulty has its own calendar, global win percentage and streak of consecutive dates won. Skipping Hard does not affect your Standard streak. The global win percentage updates throughout the day and grace period, then becomes final at 01:00 UTC. Daily progress is saved separately from expeditions. Play today’s challenge →

Try a harder route.

Standard is the default. Choose Hard before an expedition or daily challenge to block your strongest statistical advantage whenever another winning category remains. With zero or one winning category, nothing is blocked. Ties remain available, and the last winning option is never removed.

The strongest advantage uses a relative comparison with a small allowance for zero or tiny values. It is a statistical rule, not a prediction of what you know. For example, Population is blocked when India faces Kazakhstan. The blocked category stays visible and its figures appear after you play.

Difficulty stays fixed for that game. Standard and Hard have separate saved expeditions, personal bests and leaderboards. Restart game lets you choose either difficulty. Restarting the current mode starts fresh; choosing the other mode resumes its saved expedition, if there is one.