Guess the Outline
One silhouette. Six guesses.
About this game
How to play
- One country silhouette per day, drawn with no borders and no scale. You have 6 guesses to name it.
- Every wrong guess tells you how far away the answer is and in which direction, e.g. "2,400 km northeast".
- Type freely: small typos are forgiven, and you do not have to pick from the suggestions. Getting within 1,500 km counts as close.
- Win to keep your streak.
Why outlines are harder than maps
A country on a map comes with enormous context: neighbors, coastlines, labels, and a familiar position on the globe. Strip all of that away and a shape you have seen a thousand times can become unrecognizable. The silhouette is drawn with no borders, no scale, and no orientation cues beyond north being up, so Chile and Norway stop being obvious and Mali and Niger stop being distinguishable.
Scale is the detail people forget. Because every outline is drawn to fit the same box, a country the size of Luxembourg fills the frame exactly as much as Russia does. Judging by apparent size is the single most common way to go wrong.
Reading a silhouette
Look for coastline behavior first. A deeply serrated edge suggests fjords or an archipelago; a long straight edge usually means a border drawn by treaty rather than geography, which points to Africa, the Middle East, or the American West. Landlocked countries have no coast at all, which alone removes about three quarters of the world.
Then use the distance feedback properly. Each wrong guess reports how far the answer is and in which direction, so a first guess in a region you are sure about is more informative than a hesitant one. Guessing a country you know well and being told the answer lies 4,000 km southeast is worth more than guessing something plausible and being told you are 300 km away, because the first result eliminates a continent.
Common questions
- Is Guess the Outline free?
- Yes. It is free, needs no account, and has no play limit. The daily puzzle is one round; practice mode is unlimited.
- How many guesses do you get?
- You get 6 guesses. Every wrong guess reports the distance and compass direction from your guess to the answer, so the field narrows quickly.
- Are the outlines drawn to scale?
- No. Every outline is scaled to fill the same frame, so apparent size tells you nothing. This is deliberate: judging by size would give away the large countries immediately.
- How is the distance measured?
- Distances are great-circle distances between country centers, reported in kilometers or miles with an eight-point compass direction. Getting within 1,500 km counts as close.
- Which countries can appear?
- All 203 countries and territories in the dataset have real outlines, including small island nations that other outline games leave out. Nothing is approximated or omitted for being awkward to draw.