Cartogle

Cartogle gives you a naked world map and a country name, and asks you to put a finger on it. The map is a MapLibre render with borders drawn but every label stripped out, so there is no text anywhere to lean on. A pill at the top says '1 / 5', names the country, and starts a timer that ticks up in seconds while you hunt. You click once. The game then paints the real country green, drops a red dot where you clicked, and draws a line between the two with the distance in kilometres printed underneath.

1. Press PLAY, or flip to hard mode first with the small link under the button.
2. Read the country name in the header bar and find it on the unlabelled map. The clock is already running.
3. Click once on the spot you believe is inside that country. There is no confirm step, the click is the answer.
4. Study the breakdown: the distance in km between your dot and the target, then Speed out of 1,000, Accuracy out of 2,000, Correct out of 2,000, and the round Total out of 5,000.
5. Hit Next and take on the following country. After five, the recap lists every round with its distance, its time to the tenth of a second, and its points, plus your score as a percentage of the 25,000 on offer.

Because stripping the labels off a map is a brutally effective test. You can name every country in Europe and still discover you cannot point at Bulgaria without the word written on it. Cartogle's four-part score is what makes it stick: it separates knowing a country exists from knowing where it is from knowing it fast, and the green-fill reveal after each click means you leave with a corrected mental map rather than just a number. A game runs under a minute, and the hard mode set is there when the normal one stops hurting.

The scoring split is the honest part. Landing 443 km from Poland still returns 0 for Correct because the click fell outside the border, but 1,489 of the 2,000 accuracy points, which tells you plainly that you knew roughly where Poland was and still missed it. Speed is scored separately, so a fast wrong answer and a slow right one look completely different on the sheet.

Normal

The default daily set of five countries, the same for every player that day.

Hard

A separate daily set reached from 'switch to hard mode' on the title screen, with its own leaderboard tab, leaning on small, remote or easily confused countries.

• The correct-answer bonus is a cliff, not a slope. Two thousand points hang on being inside the border, so on a small country aim for the fat middle rather than the part of the outline you remember best.
• Speed is only a fifth of a round. Do not fire off a click on Tuvalu just to protect the clock, because the accuracy component will hand you a zero and the timer will have saved you a few hundred points at most.
• Open the settings gear before you start. The Topography and High Contrast toggles change how readable the borders are, and on a plain sand-coloured map high contrast makes the small European countries far easier to separate.
• Island microstates are where games are won and lost. A click on the wrong side of the Pacific can land more than 17,000 km out, most of the way round the planet, and wipe out the gains from three decent European rounds.