The capitals almost nobody gets right
Country names get recognized on sight far more often than their capitals do. Here's the group that trips up the most players in the capitals quiz, and why.
Capitals that aren't the biggest city
South Africa's capital is Pretoria, not Cape Town or Johannesburg. Sri Lanka's is Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte, not the far more famous Colombo. Tanzania's is Dodoma, not Dar es Salaam. In each case players default to the city they've actually heard of, which is usually the country's commercial or former capital rather than the current seat of government.
Purpose-built capitals
Naypyidaw (Myanmar), Abuja (Nigeria), Astana (Kazakhstan), and Canberra (Australia) were all built or designated specifically to serve as the capital, deliberately separate from the country's largest city. Because they're less prominent internationally than the city most people associate with the country, they're some of the most commonly missed answers in the whole quiz.
Tiny European microstates
San Marino, Vaduz (Liechtenstein), and Andorra la Vella (Andorra) are all capitals of countries small enough that many players forget they're independent states at all, let alone know their capital by name.
Islands and Pacific nations
Majuro (Marshall Islands), Funafuti (Tuvalu), Ngerulmud (Palau), and Yaren (Nauru) are consistently the last capitals anyone gets, for the same reason their countries are the hardest to name on the world map — they're small, remote, and rarely come up outside a geography quiz.
Capitals with unexpected spelling
N'Djamena (Chad), Nouakchott (Mauritania), and Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso) trip players up less on recall than on spelling — most people can get close but fumble the exact letters, which is where the game's built-in tolerance for small typos matters most.