Guess the Country by Cities is a free daily geography game with a simple hook: you are shown a mystery country’s biggest city, and you have to name the country in six tries. Get stuck, and every wrong guess reveals the next-largest city — and a distance and direction pointing you toward the answer.

It flips the usual city game on its head. Instead of guessing the city from clues, you read a country’s largest cities like a fingerprint and work out which country they belong to. Sometimes one name is enough; sometimes you need the whole skyline. The fewer cities you need, the better your score to share.

There is one puzzle a day for everyone in the world, plus an endless mode for when you want to keep playing. No sign-up, no app to install — it runs right here in your browser, on your phone or your laptop.

Play Guess the Country by Cities

How to play

You are shown the mystery country’s largest city to start.
Type your guess for the country — the search box accepts full names, common names (USA, UK, UAE) and two-letter country codes.
A wrong guess reveals the next-biggest city and shows the great-circle distance, a direction arrow and a proximity percentage from your guess to the answer.
Use the growing list of cities and the arrows to close in. You have six guesses.
Name the country to win — the fewer cities you needed, the stronger your share.

Game modes

Daily — one mystery country a day, the same for every player worldwide. It resets at midnight UTC, so you and your friends can compare how many cities each of you needed.

Endless — an unlimited stream of random countries to practise with. Your daily streak and stats are kept separate, so endless play never touches your daily record.

How the city clues work

The clues are the country’s major cities, revealed biggest-first: the largest city up front, then the second-largest on your first miss, and so on. City sizes are metropolitan-area estimates from Natural Earth, so a handful of “largest city” orderings will surprise you — Poland’s biggest metro is the Katowice conurbation, ahead of Warsaw, for example. That is genuine by metro population, and the next city or two usually gives the country away.

Alongside the cities you get Worldle-style feedback on every wrong guess: how many kilometres (or miles) your guessed country is from the answer, an arrow for the direction to travel, and a proximity score out of 100. Together they let you triangulate even a country whose cities you don’t recognise.

The geography behind it

A country’s biggest cities say a lot about it. A single dominant capital (Buenos Aires, Cairo, Bangkok) points to a very different place than a spread of similar-sized cities (Germany, the United States, Australia). Coastlines, colonial history and industry all leave their mark on where people cluster. Playing a few rounds is a fast, sticky way to learn the map — you start to remember that Casablanca means Morocco, that Guayaquil edges out Quito in Ecuador, and that Ho Chi Minh City is bigger than Hanoi.

Frequently asked questions

Is it the same country for everyone today?

Yes. The daily country is chosen from the date in UTC, so every player worldwide gets the exact same puzzle each day. It changes at 00:00 UTC.

Why is the “largest city” sometimes not the one I expected?

City sizes come from Natural Earth’s populated-places dataset and use metropolitan-area (urban agglomeration) population. That can rank a large conurbation ahead of a more famous city — for example the Katowice metro area ahead of Warsaw in Poland. It is correct by metro population; the next clue usually clears it up.

How many guesses do I get?

Six. Each wrong guess reveals one more city and gives you a distance, direction and proximity hint.

Do I need to know the cities to win?

It helps, but no. Even if a country’s cities are unfamiliar, the distance and direction arrows from your guesses let you close in on the answer, Worldle-style.

Is it free? Do I need an account?

Completely free, no account, no download. Your streak and stats are stored only in your own browser.

Where does the data come from?

Cities and country outlines come from Natural Earth (public domain) via the world-atlas and populated-places datasets; country facts come from Mappr’s open country dataset and Wikidata. Everything is bundled into the game — nothing about you is sent anywhere.