About Flag quiz

What this is

A quiz that shows one national flag and four country names. Your score is the number you get right, in either sudden death, which ends at your first wrong answer or after about 20 seconds without one, or a 60-second blitz in which a wrong answer scores nothing but does not stop the game. It is a free browser game: you do not need an account, and the only thing you ever type is the nickname you choose for the leaderboard.

How questions are chosen

Each game gets its own shuffle of the 196 flags, fixed by a random number the server picks when the game starts, so no flag repeats until all have been shown. For the first five questions the three wrong answers are drawn from every other country, which makes them easy to rule out. After that the wrong answers come from the fourteen flags most like the right one, ranked by how many colours they share with it and whether they are on the same continent, so the choices get closer together as you go.

Why scores can be trusted

The server chooses each question and checks each answer. Your browser is never told the correct answer before you have given yours, and it sends only the question number and the button you pressed, so a score cannot be sent from the browser. An answer cannot be replayed or sent twice for the same question, answers that come in less than a quarter of a second after the last one are refused, and the blitz clock is kept by the server with a second and a half of allowance for a slow connection. Each network address can start 30 games an hour. A determined cheater can still automate a game, which is why the boards show nicknames and not claims.

The leaderboard and nicknames

There is a board for each mode, for today (it resets at midnight UTC) and for all time. A board shows the top 20 nicknames with the best score each has reached in that period. To appear, finish a game with at least one point and enter a nickname of 2 to 16 letters, numbers, spaces, underscores or hyphens. Offensive words and disguised versions of them are refused, and names that look like staff or the system are reserved. Because there are no accounts, a nickname identifies nobody; two people who type the same name appear as one line.

What is kept

The server keeps a record of each game while you play: the mode, the question order, how far you got and your score, plus a short one-way code made from your network address to limit automated play. Records of games are cleared out after about thirty days, while scores you submitted to the leaderboard remain with the nickname. The privacy page has the full description.

Who it is for

Anyone who wants to learn flags in a few minutes a day: students preparing for a geography class or a pub quiz, travellers, and people who simply like to see how far a streak goes. The early questions are forgiving, and the closer-looking choices later on are what make a long streak worth bragging about.

Where the flags come from

Flag images are from the open-source flag-icons set (MIT licence). The list is the United Nations members and observers plus Kosovo. Names follow that list and do not imply any judgment on the status of any territory.

Corrections

If a flag or a name is wrong, say which one.

Write to zkfmapf999@gmail.com.