How many of the 193 UN member states' flags can you actually name? A four-choice survival quiz that gets steadily trickier
How it works
A flag fills the screen; pick the country from four options. Correct answers score a point, while a wrong pick โ or letting the 10 seconds run out โ costs one of three hearts. Lose all three and your run ends with your score.
- Press START. Early questions come from the best-known countries.
- Every question widens the pool by four more countries, so less familiar flags keep arriving.
- Wrong options come from the same continent where possible, which means look-alike flags often land side by side.
- No country repeats within a single run.
- When the hearts run out you reach the result screen, where a nickname puts you on the global leaderboard.
Rules and scoring
| Start | 3 hearts, score 0 |
|---|---|
| Time limit | 10 seconds per question; a timeout counts as a miss |
| Question pool | 193 UN member states (Taiwan excluded) |
| Flag artwork | 4:3 SVGs. Countries whose real flags use another ratio are shown in the same frame |
| Score | Total correct answers. You need 5 to submit |
| Grades | 40+ "vexillology nerd", 25-39 "top tier", 15-24 "above average", below that "average" |
The flags that catch everyone out
- Chad and Romania. Blue-yellow-red vertical tricolours that are nearly identical; Chad's blue is a shade darker.
- Monaco and Indonesia. Red over white in both, differing only in proportion. Poland is the same pair inverted.
- Netherlands and Luxembourg. Red-white-blue horizontal bands, with a lighter blue on Luxembourg.
- The Nordic crosses. Norway, Iceland, Finland, Sweden and Denmark all use an offset cross; the field and cross colours tell them apart.
- Ireland and Ivory Coast. Green-white-orange vertical bands in opposite order.
- Senegal, Mali and Guinea. Green-yellow-red separated by band order and whether a star sits in the middle.
How to score higher
- Learn the colour families. Pan-African green-yellow-red, pan-Arab black-white-green-red, the Nordic cross โ each region has a formula.
- Go to the centre. Between two tricolours, the emblem, star or crescent in the middle is the decider.
- Check the order. Plenty of pairs share colours and differ only in sequence.
- Pair it with capitals. The capital city quiz shows the same flags, so alternating ties face to name.
Frequently asked questions
The proportions look wrong
Every flag is drawn in a 4:3 frame. Switzerland (square) and Nepal (two stacked pennants) are fitted to the same frame.
Why is Taiwan missing?
The question pool is defined as UN member states, for consistency.
Where does the artwork come from?
The 4:3 SVGs come from the open-source flag-icons project (MIT). Country names, continents and populations come from Wikidata (September 2026).
Can the same country come up twice?
Not within one run. Starting again reshuffles everything.
Related quizzes
- Capital City Quiz โ the same 193 countries, identified by their capitals.
- Country Size Ranking Quiz โ guess which country is larger.
- World Population Ranking Quiz โ population orders that defy intuition.
- FIFA Ranking Quiz โ countries ranked by football.