FlagGrid

A three by three grid where the headings describe flags rather than countries. A board can ask for Top left: blue, Flag excludes yellow and Flag includes black down the columns, and Triangle on Hoist, Two Horizontal Stripes and Flag excludes yellow across the rows, so every cell is a two-condition puzzle: name a country whose flag does both. The intersections are what make it fun. Triangle on Hoist crossed with Flag includes black sends you hunting for a hoist triangle sitting next to a black band, and the answer that fits is not one you would have thought of cold. Correct guesses do not just tick a box, they drop the actual flag image into the cell with the country name pinned underneath, so the grid slowly turns into a little wall of flags you assembled yourself.

1. Read both headings that meet at the cell you fancy. There is no forced order, so start wherever you have a country you are sure of.
2. Click the cell. A Guess the country box opens with an autocomplete list, and you have to pick a name off that list before the Guess button will take it.
3. Fill all nine or press Give up, then open Show stats for the summary.

Flag games usually reward recall. FlagGrid rewards inventory. Knowing what the Czech flag looks like is worthless here unless you can also answer the question what else has a triangle on the hoist, and that is a much more interesting thing to get good at. The shared guess pool is the design decision that gives it teeth, since fifteen attempts across nine cells means you cannot brute force a single square without gutting your chances elsewhere. The Categories Atlas turns the whole thing into a quiet vexillology lesson, defining fimbriation-adjacent terms and stripe counts with examples, and the Most Popular Answers panel at the end is genuinely addictive: it tells you whether you found the obvious flag or the one nobody else thought of.

Right answers are loud, wrong ones are silent. Get it and the flag appears in the cell, full colour, name attached. Miss and nothing happens beyond the counter ticking down, no message telling you which of the two conditions you broke, which is a deliberately mean piece of design because half the fun is working out whether you got the pattern wrong or the colour wrong. The end panel is where the game finally talks back: a Game Summary with a grid of green ticks, your total games, wins, current streak and max streak, share buttons, and best of all a Most Popular Answers board that shows the flag everybody else put in each cell. Seeing that the crowd filled a slot with Cuba while you had wrestled your way to something obscure is the real scoreline.

Daily grid

The numbered board everyone gets, one per day, fifteen guesses, feeding the leaderboard.

FlagGrid unlimited

Unlocked by the Play flaggrid unlimited button on the finished board, for when nine cells were not enough.

Leaderboards

Daily, Weekly and a monthly ranking, listing player names, a rank title such as Explorer, and a score. You can set the name it shows through Update User in the settings gear.

• Spend your certainties first. Because the fifteen guesses are pooled, one confident answer banked early is worth more than a clever guess that might cost you two attempts.
• Treat exclusion criteria as gifts. A heading like Flag excludes yellow rules almost nothing out, so pair it with the other heading and let the harder condition do the work.
• Open the Categories Atlas before you guess, not after. It distinguishes things the game genuinely separates, like One Vertical Stripe on Hoist versus Vertical Stripe on Hoist, or Three Horizontal Stripes versus Three Equal Horizontal Stripes, and those distinctions will cost you guesses if you assume.
• Remember the criteria are not all about design. The atlas also carries Region, Total Area, Time Zone and Population, so a board can ask you to satisfy a flag pattern and a demographic fact at once.