FlagGuessr

One country flag a day, dropped on you at 4x zoom so roughly a quarter of it is visible. A puzzle can open on a slab of dark green and a sliver of white, which tells you almost nothing until you notice the crop was hiding the interesting part on purpose. The zoom is the whole design: each wrong guess pulls the camera back one step, through 2.5x, 1.75x and 1.25x, until the fifth guess is played against the flag fully revealed. That last stage is deliberately anticlimactic. If you needed it, you have already lost most of the points. The layout helps: flag on the left at a generous size, five numbered guess rows underneath, a scoring table permanently visible in the sidebar so you know exactly what each miss is costing you.

1. Look at the crop. At 4x you are usually staring at one colour field and, if you are lucky, the corner of an emblem.
2. Type a country in the box and pick it off the autocomplete list, then press Guess.
3. A miss stamps a red cross next to the country in slot #1 and, importantly, unlocks the continent, which reframes everything.
4. Keep going through the five slots as the zoom steps back, or stop the moment you are sure.

The scoring is what makes this one stick. A lot of daily flag games treat all wins as equal, so once you have got it you have got it. FlagGuessr puts a number on how early you got it, then tells you what percentage of the field you beat and which flag everyone else wrongly reached for, and that turns a ten-second puzzle into something you actually want to be good at. The five zoom steps are well chosen too, generous enough that you are never guessing blind by the end and stingy enough that a first-guess solve genuinely means something. It is free, it needs no account, it runs no ads, and the little paragraph of vexillology on the results card means even a total failure teaches you something about the flag that just beat you.

The board is honest and unsentimental: a red cross, the country you named, the zoom loosening a notch. What lifts it is the results card, which is one of the better ones in the genre. It shows the flag in full, names the country, and then adds a short note on why the flag looks the way it does, for instance an explanation of what the central emblem is depicting and the founding legend behind it. Underneath sits your emotion label, and the labels are the joke: VEXILLOLOGIST for a first-guess solve, then FLAG EXPERT, GETTING THERE, LOST and CLUELESS on the way down. Fail all five and it does not even give you CLUELESS, it calls you UNGUESSABLE and hands you a flat 0 out of 10,000. It then tells you what percentage of players you beat, which country most people guessed, what yesterday's answer was, and how long your streak survived.

Daily flag

The only real mode. One numbered puzzle for everyone, five guesses, midnight UTC rollover, streak that breaks if you skip a day.

Past puzzles

A calendar reachable once the day's flag is settled, for catching up on the ones you missed.

• Read the crop for shade, not colour. A quarter of a flag rarely shows you a pattern, but it will show you whether that green is a dark forest green or a bright emerald, and shade is what separates most tricolours.
• Waste your first guess deliberately if you are lost. The continent hint only arrives after a miss, so a considered throwaway at 4x can be worth more than a real attempt.
• Watch what the zoom is hiding rather than what it shows. The crop is anchored, so a large empty colour field on one side usually means the emblem or charge you need is sitting just outside the frame.
• Guess three matters more than it looks. The 1.75x step is the one where partial emblems become readable, and 6,000 points is the last score that feels respectable.