Outlines

A new outline every day

Everyone gets the same outline each day, and a new one arrives at midnight your time. Monday and Tuesday it's one of the world's best-known countries, Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday a well-known one, and Friday and Saturday a less familiar one.

You get one try a day: name it within six guesses, or the day's game, and your streak, are over. If you're stuck, you can give up and see the answer, and that ends the day's game too.

Find it on consecutive days to build a streak, then share your result. A shared result shows how many guesses you took, never the country.

How to play Outlines

1. You see a country's outline, scaled to fit the card. Name the country.
2. Each wrong guess shows how far away the answer is, border to border, an arrow pointing toward it, and whether it's bigger or smaller than your guess.
3. You have six guesses. Name it within six and you've solved it. Stuck? Give up, and the answer shows.

Outlines are drawn without the stretching of a flat world map, so countries far north look as they really are. Faraway islands are left off, so the United States is just its lower 48, and Norway is without Svalbard. Territories such as Greenland and Puerto Rico count as countries here. The smallest countries, the ones too tiny to know by shape, are never the answer.

Tips

• Coastlines give it away. A long, ragged coast, a peninsula or a tell-tale island can say more than the outline's overall shape.
• Guess somewhere central first. If you have no idea, a big country in the middle of a continent makes the arrow and the distance most useful.
• Use bigger and smaller. If the answer is bigger than a country you've guessed, it can't be one of its small neighbors.