About the country data
Every sentence on the country pages is generated from one dataset — there is no hand-written copy that can quietly drift from the numbers. This page says where that dataset comes from and which editorial calls it bakes in.
Which countries get a page
The 193 UN member states plus the two UN observer states, Vatican City and Palestine: 195 pages. Kosovo, Taiwan and Western Sahara do not get pages — their status is genuinely disputed, and a geography game is not the place where that gets adjudicated. For the same reason, borders with them are left out of their neighbours' counts rather than counted one way or the other, which is why Morocco lists one land neighbour and Serbia seven.
Land borders
Border counts are land borders only, taken from Natural Earth's 1:50m map — two countries border each other where their shapes share an arc. Two further rules:
- A border is listed only where both countries sit on the same continent's board. Morocco does not list Spain (Ceuta and Melilla), and Egypt does not list Israel — a border across two maps is on neither of them. The world board still deals both countries.
- Zambia and Botswana meet at the Kazungula quadripoint, and whether that is a border at all is genuinely argued over — so it is not counted.
Population and area
Population is the World Bank's SP.POP.TOTL series, each country at its own most recent published year (currently 2025 data). The World Bank publishes no figure for Vatican City, so its page shows none rather than a guess. Area is from the world-countries dataset, in square kilometres, as the dataset reports it.
Capitals
Each country has exactly one capital in the quizzes — the one its page shows in large type. Where reality is less tidy — the role split across cities (South Africa, Bolivia, the Netherlands, Eswatini, Sri Lanka, Côte d'Ivoire), a claimed capital (Palestine), or no official capital at all (Nauru) — the page carries a note saying so, and the quiz keeps accepting the one standard answer.
Currencies and languages
Both come from the world-countries dataset. Where several currencies circulate, the page names the main day-to-day one. Official languages are listed as the dataset names them, with a few corrections to constitutional names; past three languages the page counts the rest instead of naming them.
Transcontinental countries
Seven countries sit on two continents — Russia, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Armenia and Cyprus. They appear on both continents' boards and both continent lists; their page's map is drawn from the first of the two.
When this was last updated
The dataset is regenerated from its sources by script, never edited by hand, and every page is rebuilt from it on each deploy. Current data snapshot: 2025. If a number on a country page is wrong, it is wrong here first — tell us and the fix lands on all 195 pages at once.