Outlines

Medium Outlines puzzles

Medium outlines are well-known countries, north up, and fewer of them have a shape you'd know anywhere.

Practice gives you countries you haven't found yet, as many as you like, and keeps your best time without hints. Once you've found every country at a level, the other levels' countries come next, those closest in difficulty first.

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.