This is already written elsewhere, but this game screams to work efficiently with the keyboard, so one can just type country names and hit 'return'.
I can already mostly navigate it with TAB + shift-TAB, but as the game loop is simply 'type name, get feedback', it seems weird the keyboard flow has not been polished in its otherwise quite polished design.
I am at two minds about the drop-down matches covering the beautiful prompt map. I realise I should be able to carry on typing even though I then can no longer look at the country shape, but for the design purity of it, I would prefer the drop-down to not cover the prompt. Maybe by allocating less space to the candidates, at max showing 2-3 options, or showing them _beneath_ the map.
Still, very beautiful compared to a version I made 20 years ago for my private use (CIA world database map says hello!).
This is more interesting than the one that came out around the time of the initial Wordle craze. That was only an unscaled shape which was really hard even if you were pretty good at geography. (Most countries don't have a very distinctive shape.)
Neighborle is an ok daily geography game. If you're really good at geography then it's probably too easy but every couple days one of the puzzles actually makes me think (usually stuff on the Atlantic coast of Africa).
I have tried to get this to work. The problem has to do with the material UI Select component used. I think the problem is that the return key is already used to select an item from the select.
Gameplay wise, I find the feedback loop to be lacking tho. Right now, there's no much feedback other than "You got it wrong, actually, it's X. Anyway, moving on...". This makes it less of an educational game and more like a test.
For me, I'm always close, so revealing neighbor countries on the map along with the answer (especially for small countries) can add a "spaced repetition" element to the game, it help your brain connect the dots and feel more productive and fun
This. There used to be a fun geography game on the Commodore 64 where you had to fly a helicopter over countries/capitals. It was fun because when you had no idea where a country was, you just kept flying in circles. They got the gameplay right to some degree.
I've been playing Travle for a while, didn't know it had a dedicated URL for the challenges, that's nice. I wish the challenges had an infinite play mode like https://travle.earth/practice/, but oh well. Thanks for linking that!
I love it, my only feedback was the I didn't really understand which I was supposed to pick when it showed me N. Korea. Because all I saw the Korean Peninsula, and the north was dark green and the south was light green.
It seems to be showing the recognised territories in dark green and contested areas in light green (e.g. for Russia, Crimea is also in light green, although interestingly not Eastern Ukraine, and IIRC the West of Guyana was shown in light green for Venezula).
These things are always slightly arbitrary, e.g. why include Taiwan but not, say, Somaliland (both are unrecognised by most other states but de facto independent).
That is correct about the green colors work. Most of the maps are from wikipedia and that's how they do show contested areas in light green. I think I will change them though to another source because it is confusing.
Yep, when North Korea is selected, both North Korea and South Korea are highlighted and it's not clear which country is requested. Same goes for South Korea.
The positions of the Pacific islands and the smallest nations of the Caribbean are difficult to remember. For Central America it's hard to remember the north to south sequence and the same for the equatorial region of the coast of western Africa. Everything else is pretty easy.
Considering how many countries are there in those regions I expect that I should achieve at least 50% but not close to 75%. That's surprisingly bad for an European that thinks to know geography.
Five at random would be fairly trivial, do you mean giving the five adjacent or nearest countries? Then one would learn to tell them apart, or even if not, at least you'd learn to associate the area whenever hearing about that country on the news or so. That would be a nice improvement probably!
> If I click "Check" without typing anything and then click "Correct" my score goes up.
I believe that’s a feature. If you can’t find the actual answer (or don’t want to) you can just say or think the answer for yourself, then check and honestly choose if you got it right. That way you still get to keep track of your score, without having to input the name every time.
The hard ones for me were countries in mainland Africa, island nations in the Atlantic and the Pacific, and small adjacent countries that you associate in a group – say Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, or Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan.
You could do easier difficulty by making the questions multiple choice. (I mean, technically it's already multiple choice, but say 5ish choices.) Potentially could have multiple levels of difficulty by varying the number of choices, or by selecting options by proximity.
I disagree with any suggestion that makes the game easier. There are a lot of websites with name-that-country games. For people who are pretty good at locating and naming countries, they want to improve their ability, and they need a tougher game to do that.
It would be fun if there were some country factoids or images, probably. But for people who are trying to get really good at locating countries, they probably already do know facts about various countries, so there isn't a lot of value there.
Spaced repetition of mistakes would be valuable. Very few alternatives offer this.
Maybe you could also offer to filter on a population cutoff? I frequently cut off countries with less than 200k population, because I am not that interested in the various island countries.
The pictures come straight from Wikipedia. From the picture for North Korea (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korea): Territory controlled by North Korea shown in dark green; territory claimed but not controlled shown in light green.
I enjoyed it; I like that you can use this without entering the country name, i.e. do just "Check" -> "Correct"/"Wrong". This is such a fast and rewarding loop, reminds me of flash cards or spaced repetition apps.
I'm at 27/45 when I ran out of available time (IRL), which is pretty depressing for someone who once knew them all :(
The ones you never hear about slip the mind. Sure I can still say Zambia is near South Africa, but which one is Mozambique, which one Botswana, and which one Zambia? Hard
I even had trouble remembering Yemen! Always found that easy for some reason, especially after I remembered that the order is "YO!" (Yemen, then Oman). Again not a country much news comes from
This is legitimately great! Would love it if there was some sort of session persistence (even if it's just an array in localStorage of countries I've already covered.) that way I could play through all the countries without having to keep the window open. Simple and effective game! Nice job :)
If you know Kazakhstan is the biggest then you can get the rest. They're alphabetical going clockwise from Kazakhstan -> Kyrgyzstan -> Tajikistan -> Turkmenistan -> Uzbekistan
An interesting demonstration of the difference between number averages and mass/size averages. Did great on the big countries. No idea where San Marino was, so lots of relatively smaller countries pulled my average down. By mass/size, probably 90+ %. By number, only 70%.
Website, not web app. Static website if it has no backend. Strictly speaking, 'static' used to mean no JavaScript either, so perhaps 'jamstack' is the appropriate neologism.
Great work! Only feedback would be to make the drop-down search aware of the abbreviations for various countries. For example, St. Lucia rather than Saint Lucia, DPRK for North Korea, or even CAR rather than Central African Republic.
This seems to conflate the idea of a nation (ie a people) with that of a country or state, which I find pretty odd. Many countries are composed of many constituent nations, many of which will cross state borders.
I wish the dropdown didn't cover the entire map when you focus the text box, another nice feature would be being able to select multiple regions (e.g. just Europe and Asia)
I mean, there is no "objective" list of countries everyone agrees on, nor how many are there in total. You're gonna upset some people regardless of which definition you choose.
Excellent! Small bug: null responses are considered "correct" in the right/wrong counter. I've skipped 3 and gotten 3 wrong, and it's showing 3/6 correct.
I think the better way for me would be to form some (really, any) kind of association to more African countries, most of which are a total blur to me. Most other countries I could say something about.
It doesn't help that most of Africa is basically only in the media if there's a disease or war or something.
That does help for sure - I have friends who are from or have been to Kenya, Zambia, Mali, Gambia, South Africa, Egypt, Morocco, Somalia and a few others, so perhaps I've got a bit of a head start. If you're starting from scratch, one enjoyable way is to read their Wikipedia articles when they come up in the news, that way you don't just get the sensationalised news stories and can form more rounded associations with the country.
Not at all, there might be a 4/5 neighbour countries you don’t fully remember which one is which but generally I don’t know many people who would find that not boring. Maybe it is an European thing
