Pin the Country
Find it on the map. Drop a pin.
About this game
How to play
- You get a country name. Find it on the world map and drop a pin: click or tap anywhere. You have 6 pins.
- Every miss tells you how far your pin landed from the country and in which direction, e.g. "2,400 km northeast". Pan and zoom as much as you like, it never costs a guess.
- The two corner panels zoom into the Caribbean and the Pacific, so island nations are never lost in open ocean. Pinning inside the country, or within a whisker of its border at your current zoom, wins the round.
- With a keyboard: focus the map, pan with the arrow keys, zoom with plus and minus, and press Enter to drop a pin at the crosshair.
- Win to keep your streak.
Small countries get a fair chance
Most map games quietly exclude the countries that are hard to click. Pin the Country includes all 203 of them, and solves the fairness problem three ways instead. Two docked panels permanently magnify the Caribbean and the Pacific, so island nations are never a single pixel in open ocean. A click within a short screen distance of a country's border counts as a hit, with the tolerance recalculated at your current zoom so it never becomes a way to win by accident. And the distance-and-direction feedback converges just as fast on Tuvalu as on Brazil.
The daily pick is weighted by size class, so larger countries come up more often than micro-states, and a 90-day no-repeat window means you will not see the same country twice in a season.
Using the feedback well
The distance is measured to the nearest point of the country's actual boundary, not to its center, so "180 km east" means you are genuinely close to the edge. When the reported distance drops sharply between two guesses, you have crossed into the right region and should switch from guessing to zooming.
Panning and zooming never cost a guess, so there is no reason to pin from a world view. Zoom until country borders are distinct, then drop the pin. On a keyboard, focus the map, pan with the arrow keys, zoom with plus and minus, and press Enter to drop a pin at the crosshair.
Common questions
- Is Pin the Country free?
- Yes. It is free, needs no account, and has no play limit. The daily puzzle is one round; practice mode is unlimited and can be filtered by continent.
- How many guesses do you get?
- You get 6 pins. Each miss reports how far your pin landed from the country and in which compass direction.
- How close do you have to be to win?
- Landing inside the country always wins. So does landing within a short screen distance of its border, measured in pixels at your current zoom level, which keeps tiny countries winnable without making large ones trivial.
- How do you pin a very small country?
- Zoom in, which never costs a guess, or use the two corner panels that permanently magnify the Caribbean and the Pacific. Clicks in those panels resolve through their own projections into exactly the same guess, so nothing is lost by using them.
- Can you play with a keyboard?
- Yes. Focus the map, pan with the arrow keys, zoom with plus and minus, and press Enter to drop a pin at the crosshair. The whole game is playable without a mouse.
- Does everyone get the same country each day?
- Yes. The daily country is seeded from the calendar date and rolls over at your local midnight. The pick is weighted so larger countries appear more often, and a 90-day window prevents repeats.