How many countries can you name?

About Country Quiz

Country Quiz is a free browser game built for one very specific itch: proving to yourself, definitively, how many countries — or US states — you can actually name off the top of your head. Just you, a blank input box, and a map that slowly stops being blank as you go. Every correct answer inks that country or state onto the map in real time, so your progress is something you can watch happen rather than a number ticking up in a corner. If flags or capital cities are more your thing, those live in their own dedicated modes — see the Flag Quiz and Capitals Quiz above.

The world countries mode tracks 196 countries: the 193 member states of the United Nations, the two UN observer states (Vatican City and Palestine), and Taiwan, whose sovereignty is disputed but which is commonly included in geography quizzes of this kind. The US states mode tracks all 50 US states, using the same rules, timer, and duel format.

How to play

1. Pick a game: World Countries or US States. Each keeps its own separate saved progress.
2. Choose a timer mode: No Timer if you want to sit with it and really dig through memory, or Timed if you want the pressure of a 15-minute countdown, which is the format most commonly used for this kind of quiz.
3. Type the full name of a country or state into the box and press Enter, or just keep typing — a correct match is accepted the moment it's unambiguous. Abbreviations and partial names (like "UK" or "Cali") aren't accepted — the game wants the whole word, though minor typos are forgiven and a short list of well-known full alternate names (like Ivory Coast, Holland, or Czech Republic) is accepted too.
4. Your progress saves automatically to your browser, so you can close the tab mid-run and come back to the exact same state later.
5. Stuck? Click Give Up at any point to end the run early — every country or state you didn't get is revealed on the map immediately, highlighted in a different color from the ones you found.
6. When you're done — you've named everything, the timer runs out, or you gave up — the missed answers stay visible on the map so you can study them before your next run.

Play modes

World Countries vs US States

World Countries is the full 196-country challenge across every continent. US States is a faster, more focused round: all 50 states on a standard Albers-projection map, the same layout you'd recognize from a classroom wall map, with Alaska and Hawaii shown as insets.

No timer

The relaxed mode. There's no clock running, so you can take as long as you like, get up and think, and come back. This is the mode most people use the first time they play, since the goal early on is usually just seeing how many you know rather than beating a deadline.

Timed challenge

A 15-minute countdown appears on screen and counts down instead of up. This is the standard format used in most "name them all" challenges you'll find elsewhere, and it's the mode to use if you want a comparable score to share with friends.

Save and resume

Progress is stored locally in your browser the moment you find a country or state, so there's no account or sign-up required. Countries and US states track separately, so switching games never overwrites the other's progress. Come back tomorrow, next week, or next month, and your map will be exactly as you left it.

Challenge a friend (duel mode)

Duel mode generates a short room code you can send to someone else. Once they join with that code, you're both racing the same list on separate maps, and each player can see the other's live progress count. First to complete the full list wins the duel.

Countries by region

If you want to warm up before attempting the full list, it often helps to go region by region rather than trying to recall all 196 at once. Here's the full breakdown, including a few countries per region and their capitals as memory anchors.

Africa — 54 countries

The continent with the most countries of any region, stretching from Algeria and Egypt in the north to South Africa and Eswatini in the south. It's also home to some of the trickiest near-duplicate names in the whole game: Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, and Equatorial Guinea are three separate countries, and the Republic of the Congo is distinct from the much larger Democratic Republic of the Congo next door.

Asia — 48 countries

Spans from Turkey and Georgia in the west to Japan in the east, and from Russia in the north to Indonesia in the south — technically the largest region both by land area and by population, since it includes China and India.

Europe — 44 countries

Includes several of the smallest nations in the game — San Marino, Monaco, Liechtenstein, and Vatican City are all under 500 square kilometers combined — alongside Russia, which is by far the largest country in the world by land area (though most of that land lies in Asia).

North America — 23 countries

Dominated by Canada, the United States, and Mexico by land area, but most of the region's country count comes from the Caribbean — a dozen island nations that are easy to lose track of if you're not going through them deliberately.

Oceania — 14 countries

Beyond Australia and New Zealand, this region is full of small Pacific island nations that trip up even strong players — Tuvalu, Nauru, Kiribati, and Palau among them. Several of these are so small they're barely visible at the map's default zoom.

South America — 12 countries

The smallest region by country count, but every country here tends to get named quickly since the list is short and familiar to most players.

Tips for naming more countries

• Do the big landmasses first. Most players clear Europe and the Americas almost completely before slowing down — that's normal, not a sign you're bad at this.
• Africa is where scores are won or lost. With 54 countries and several similar full names (Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea), this region separates a good run from a great one — and remember, you need the complete name for each.
• Don't forget the small ones. Vatican City, San Marino, Monaco, and Liechtenstein are frequently forgotten simply because they're tiny on the map — but they count the same as any other entry.
• Pacific island nations are the final boss. Tuvalu, Nauru, Kiribati, Palau, the Marshall Islands, and Micronesia are the countries most players miss entirely on a first attempt.
• Type the whole name. Since abbreviations aren't accepted, saying "United States" instead of "US" and "United Kingdom" instead of "UK" will save you from wasted keystrokes that don't register.

Tips for naming all 50 states

• Go coast to coast. Working geographically — West Coast, Mountain states, Midwest, South, Northeast — is easier to keep track of than free-recall.
• The small Northeast states blur together. Rhode Island, Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Massachusetts are frequently mixed up or forgotten entirely because of how tightly packed they are on the map.
• Type the complete name. "North Dakota" and "South Dakota" are separate answers from "Dakota" alone — half-typed names won't match.

Further reading

The countries most people forget — a closer look at which countries trip up players most often, and why.
World countries vs US states: which is harder? — a real comparison of the two modes.
How to tell similar flags apart — quick visual tricks for the flag look-alikes that trip up the flag quiz.
The capitals almost nobody gets right — why purpose-built capitals and non-largest-city capitals are the hardest part of the capitals quiz.

Frequently asked questions

About this project

Country Quiz was built as a small, focused geography game — the kind of thing you'd bookmark and come back to every few months to see if your score has improved. Both maps use real geographic projections rendered directly in your browser as scalable vector graphics, so they stay sharp at any screen size and the whole page loads quickly, even on a slow connection.

Got a correction on a country or state name, a missing accepted spelling, or a bug to report? Reach out through the contact link in the footer.

Privacy

Game progress is stored only in your browser's local storage and is never sent to a server unless you start a duel, in which case only your live country/state count is shared with the person you're playing against. This site may show advertising served by third parties, which may use cookies to personalize ads based on your visits to this and other sites.