About Countriq

What Countriq is

Countriq pairs quick daily geography games — guess the country by shape, by flag, and by capital — with reference pages that are genuinely useful: which countries share a land border, and plain-English travel eSIM guides. Everything is free, needs no account, and has no hint paywall. The games and border reference are available in English, German, French, Spanish and Portuguese.

Available in five languages — and how we localise

Countriq is published in English, German, French, Spanish and Portuguese, and our localisation is built to a standard most quiz sites skip. We do not run pages through a machine-translation engine and hope for the best. Instead:

• Every country and capital name comes from an authoritative open database — the multilingual labels, official short names and encyclopaedia article titles published by Wikidata and Wikipedia — cross-checked against each other and de-duplicated. So a German player reads Frankreich and Vereinigtes Königreich, a Spanish player reads Países Bajos, not a literal or anglicised guess.
• The grammar is written natively for each language, not bolted on. Generated sentences use the correct definite article (der/die/das, le/la/les, el/la/los, o/a/os) and the right singular-or-plural verb agreement — “Die Schweiz grenzt an …”, “Les États-Unis partagent …” — plus each locale's own number formatting.
• Search engines are told which version to serve through reciprocal hreflang annotations across all five languages, and you can switch language on any page with the globe menu in the header — it takes you to the exact same page in the language you pick, not back to the homepage.

The result is 174 countries described in five languages by a deliberate, source-backed process — not a translation plugin.

How the daily game works

We think the mechanics matter, so here's exactly what happens under the hood:

• One puzzle a day, the same for everyone. The daily country is chosen by a fixed seed derived from the date (rolling over at midnight UTC), so every player worldwide gets the identical challenge and scores are comparable. Well-known countries are weighted to appear more often in the daily so casual players aren't hit with obscure states; endless mode draws from the full set with no limit.
• Honest, mathematical hints. After a wrong guess we compute the real great-circle (haversine) distance in kilometres between your guess and the answer, the compass bearing toward it (shown as an arrow), and a proximity score — so you're triangulating, not guessing blind.
• Your streak stays on your device. Progress and streaks are saved in your browser's local storage. There's no account and we don't track your individual play.

Our data sources

We use only openly licensed, commercially usable sources, and we process them ourselves rather than reselling someone else's database:

• Country outlines — Natural Earth (public domain). We project and normalise each shape so it sits centred in the frame regardless of the country's real size.
• Country facts (capitals, regions, land borders, population, area) — REST Countries and the World Bank.
• Localised names (countries and capitals, in five languages) — Wikidata and Wikipedia, as described above.
• Flags — the open-source flag-icons project (MIT).
• Mobile-network lists on the eSIM pages — curated by hand from each country's main public operators.

We deliberately do not scrape proprietary databases. Pages are generated from this data at build time and served as fast, static files, with structured data (Schema.org) on every page.

Who's behind Countriq

Countriq is made by Countriq Editorial, a small independent team of geography and travel enthusiasts. We design and code the games, build the localisation pipeline, curate the country data, and write and maintain the travel guides ourselves. We are not a large media company and we are not backed by any quiz or travel brand.

How we make money

Countriq is free to play and read. Some outbound links — for example to eSIM providers on our travel pages — are partner (affiliate) links. If you buy through one, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.

This never changes the facts we publish or which providers we list, and we will never put game features, hints or data behind a paywall. Where a link can earn us a commission, we mark it as a partner link.

Accuracy and corrections

We work to keep everything accurate, but borders, capitals, names, carriers and travel details do change. If you spot something wrong or out of date — in any of our five languages — please tell us at [email protected]. Corrections are genuinely welcome and we act on them.

Independent

Countriq is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to GeoGuessr, Worldle, Seterra, or any other geography game, quiz or travel brand.

Last reviewed: June 2026.