What is ATLAS — Dress the map in the flags of all 195 countries
ATLAS opens a blank continent and lets you choose where to start. You tap a country, type its name, and if you are right the territory stops being grey and wears that country's flag, from the cut of the coastline to the last border. Nothing forces an order and no clock counts down at you: clear the ones you know by heart first, then keep closing the map until only the hard ones are left. There are 195 sovereign countries across six continents — 50 in Europe, 49 in Asia, 54 in Africa, 23 in North America, 12 in South America and 15 in Oceania — and eight of them, from Russia to Egypt, appear on two maps, because that is where they are.
Territories that are not independent countries, such as Greenland, Puerto Rico or New Caledonia, are still drawn, in dark grey and out of play: they are there so you can recognise the coast, not to be answered. Each country gives you four tries and three hints you can ask for, and both cost points, so a fast first-try answer is worth more than double a fourth-try one. The map zooms up to fourteen times with the wheel, with two fingers or with the corner buttons, and countries too small to hit with a fingertip — Monaco, the Vatican, Nauru, Tuvalu — carry a round target on top so they are never left out.
How to play
- Choose a continent on the opening screen. The six cards show the map you are about to face and how many countries are waiting on it.
- Tap a country. Its outline lights up and the box “Which country is this?” opens below: type the name and press Enter or the arrow beside it.
- Get it wrong and you keep three more tries; the four dots next to the box show how many are left. After the fourth the country is revealed and stays marked in red.
- Press Hint when you are stuck, or Reveal to move on. As soon as the last country is settled, the scorecard for the round appears.
Strategies that work
- A first-try answer is worth 100 points, a second 65, a third 40 and a fourth 20. Thinking for ten more seconds almost always beats a blind guess.
- The speed bonus only counts on the first try: 45 points if you answer straight away, fading to zero at eighteen seconds. One wrong guess wipes it out entirely.
- Every first-try answer with no hints adds to your streak, and the streak multiplies: at ten in a row you are earning 50% more on each country. A miss resets the counter, which is why it pays to start with the countries you know by heart.
- Hints cost 10, 22 and 38 points, cumulatively. The first gives you the initial letter and the number of letters, and it is usually enough to unlock a name on the tip of your tongue; the third shows the flag and is almost never needed.
- You can answer in English, Portuguese, Spanish or French, without accents and without fear of a slipped letter: “espana”, “franca” and “bielorussia” all go through. What the game never accepts is another country's name — “England” will not do for the United Kingdom.
A little history
ATLAS was written from scratch for puzzle-me.com and is the only game on the site where the flag is the reward rather than the clue. The outlines come from Natural Earth, the public-domain cartographic atlas, at a scale of 1:50,000,000, and each continent is drawn in the Lambert azimuthal equal-area projection, published by Johann Heinrich Lambert in 1772: it is what keeps the areas honest, so that Sudan does not shrink nor Greenland swell. The 195 flags come from flag-icons, an MIT-licensed collection, converted into small images that travel inside the game file itself — nothing is requested from an outside server, not even the flag you are looking at. The tolerance for typos uses the Levenshtein distance, described by Vladimir Levenshtein in 1965 to count how many letters must change to turn one word into another.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need to install anything or create an account?
No. ATLAS runs in the browser, on a computer and on a phone, and plays as well by finger as by mouse. There is no sign-up and no download: the whole game, maps, flags and the country names in four languages, ships inside the page itself, so it keeps working if your connection drops mid-round. Your best score on each continent is kept on your own device.
Is the daily challenge really the same for everyone?
It is. In daily mode the game does not hand you a whole continent: it draws one continent and ten of its countries from the date in UTC, and it is that date, not the clock on your phone, that decides everything. Someone playing in Lisbon, in Sao Paulo or in Tokyo on the same day gets exactly the same ten countries. Once the official round is over you can keep playing freely: only the first round counts for the day's leaderboard.
How is the score worked out?
Each country is worth 100, 65, 40 or 20 points depending on the try you get it on, minus 10, 22 or 38 if you ask for hints. A first-try answer adds up to 45 speed points, which fade to nothing at eighteen seconds. Consecutive first-try answers with no hints build a multiplier that climbs 5% at a time, up to 50%. At the end comes the final bonus: up to 1800 points for your accuracy, squared, plus 2.5 points for every second left over from a budget of fourteen seconds per country.
