Flags of the World Quiz

The timer runs until the last flag is named or you press Give up. The order is up to you.

A plan for 195 flags

Scanning the grid for flags you know feels natural and works badly: you will find the famous ones and then stall. Typing from a mental map of the world works better, because each country reminds you of its neighbor.

1. Go continent by continent in your head. Recite Europe west to east, Africa from the Mediterranean coast down to the Cape, then Asia, then the Americas, and type as you go. Let the grid catch the names.
2. Do the island states as their own sweep. The Caribbean and the Pacific hide many small countries that slip out of any continent-by-continent pass: Grenada, Dominica, Saint Lucia, Tuvalu, Nauru, Palau.
3. Then study the grid. The flags still unnamed tend to cluster in families, and that tells you what to learn next.
4. When you press Give up, write down the flags that were left. That list, not the whole set, is your homework for the next attempt.

Families that sort the grid for you

Once you see the families, the grid stops being 195 separate pictures. Central America has a blue, white and blue set: Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador use horizontal stripes, Honduras with five blue stars, while Guatemala turns the same colors vertical. Russia, Slovakia and Slovenia share white, blue and red horizontal stripes; Slovakia and Slovenia add a shield, and Russia's is plain.

Red, yellow and green in horizontal bands belong to Bolivia (red on top), Ghana (red on top, with a black star) and Ethiopia (green on top, with an emblem), while Lithuania puts yellow on top. In the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand both carry the Union Jack and the Southern Cross: Australia's stars are white, New Zealand's are red with white borders.

Two flags stand out by shape alone: Switzerland and Vatican City are square. Vatican City and Palestine, the two UN observer states included here, are easy to forget when typing from memory, so add them to your list early.

Working up to it

If 195 blank tiles is too much on day one, start with Choice mode on this page or with the flag quiz, where every flag comes with four options from the same region. Learn mode lets you hover over any country and see its name, capital and flag with no score at all.

After that, guess the flag names a country and asks you to pick its flag, which trains recall from the other direction. For the same from-memory exercise on a map instead of flags, the countries of the world quiz asks you to type all 195 countries and fills them in as you go.

Running it with a class

Split the class by continent and give each group five minutes to call out every flag from its part of the world while one person types. The grid makes the result visible to everyone, and the gaps left at the end show which continent needs another lesson. Done again a week later, it gives you a before and after on one screen.

All the flags in this quiz

Names and capitals: CIA World Factbook (final edition), checked against Wikidata and Natural Earth. Flags: flag-icons, each checked against Wikimedia Commons. See sources. Spotted a mistake? Tell us.