Show HN: Name That Nation
namethatnation.comI made this map game. react, material ui, hosted on vercel cdn, no back end. 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). This was the one I was thinking of. https://worldle.teuteuf.fr/ Yeah, it's mostly African countries or random islands that gave me the most trouble. Right. Plus all the central Asian "*stans" 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. Nice project 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. Screenshots:
https://www.myabandonware.com/game/maps-usa-n4v Absolutely!! Some more suggestions of mine: * Show the incorrect guess you just made on the map, even if not close * Repeat countries that you got wrong within the next 10 turns, to learn by repetition It does keep a list of countries you got wrong and you can go through them again. Or atleast uncover the names of countries already answered, feels like slowly colouring in the map of the world. Its good, but I was expecting a rotate/zoom I really like travle.earth: https://travle.earth/challenge/ 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've made an account right now just to say thank you for introducing me to this game! 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. Yes, pictures are loaded directly either from Wikimedia: File: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/05/Venezuel... Page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Venezuela_Orthographic_... …or from … CIA.gov "World Factbook" site (https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/), e.g.: https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/static/f7ce629bc057da... At the very least include a legend so we know they mean 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. That confused me as well 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. You can make this more educative by showing 4 or 5 options to choose from for a particular country. That would be the easy mode... you could also vary difficulty by picking nearby countries to make it a bit more difficult. 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! For those who want to learn map, capital, and flag: https://github.com/anki-geo/ultimate-geography I liked it. Maybe you could add some facts about each country as a tip or after the answer was checked. And the tiny countries such as the Vatican or the Pacific Island states could be zoomed in. Nice, enjoyed seeing how I don't know the political map as good as I thought. If I click "Check" without typing anything and then click "Correct" my score goes up. > 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. That is correct. It is a feature. It is a challenge how to make it more clear to the user. 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. Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia are easy - they go in alphabetical order from north to south. Also, Estonia is closest to Finland, which makes sense since the languages are close. and it makes sense that lithuania is the bottom one (ie, closest to poland), since there used to be a polish lithuanian commonwealth Also Lat-via as in lateral makes me think of it in the middle. For the 'stans, I remember TUTK (west to east), and that Turkmenistan is closest to Turkey. The other way to remember is, if you can remember that Kazakhstan is the biggest, then it goes alphabetically clockwise. Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan 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 liked it a lot, especially the UI. 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. Here is my very half-assed version I built once upon a time: https://github.com/ruggeri/world-map-game. Yours is a lot better. Oh, another suggestion: show the country and let them name the capital! What do the colors mean
Why was North Korea in dark green and South Korea in light green, and which should I name? 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. China isn't in light green for Taiwan. Is that situation different in some way? But Taiwan is in light green for China... Does Taiwan claim sovereignty over mainland China? Technically speaking yes. It's complicated. It did historically, and has not formally renounced its claim (which included Mongolia). yeah, very different power imbalance and influence :) How so? Where's North Korea's influence? If anything, Taiwan has more ability to enforce its territorial claims. North Korea appears as a territory of South Korea, not the opposite I assumed it was areas contested by that country, could be wrong. I think Germany was orange. Certainly not clear if I should put North Korea or South Korea. My score was 7/20. 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 Yemen has been in the news lately, because of its location. Ships have been avoiding the Red Sea because people in Yemen were firing rockets at them. Ah, I had not heard that particular news story I'm having issues with keyboard navigation on Firefox: * Typing a few letters then pressing tab closes the dropdown instead of selecting options in the dropdown * when the text box is selecting, pressing enter does nothing; I need to press tab then enter to submit the answer Yep, I'd play this a lot more if I was able to use only the keyboard. + 1 The need to click "submit" was my biggest bad UX moment For learning geography, I like: https://www.jetpunk.com/quizzes/how-many-countries-can-you-n... I ran across it years ago and decided to use it to practice naming countries. For a harder challenge, try this one, which doesn't give you a map: How about a hard mode that doesn't tell you what the answer is until you're done? Process of elimination makes the last 50 pretty easy if you look through the dropdown. Fun! A little too easy to check the filenames of the images if stuck for an answer but I imagine most people aren't dirty cheats like me :P Nice!
One thing to note is that typing on the search is case sensitive. Please make it insensitive, so I don't have to type M instead of m. On Firefox if I type the answer and tab to the continue button, It's counted as correct, even if it's false. Keyboard accessibility could use some love. 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 :) Give partial score for close guess, I called Benin a Sierra Leone, or art least show my guess and target country Yeah, I was pretty good in Asia, except for the various ex-USSR "-stans" (I just know Kazakhstan is the biggest one). If you know Kazakhstan is the biggest then you can get the rest. They're alphabetical going clockwise from Kazakhstan -> Kyrgyzstan -> Tajikistan -> Turkmenistan -> Uzbekistan "Mexico" -> "USA, close enough" Also possible with Russia + either one of those: * Ukraine * Norway * Poland * Estonia * Lithuania * North Korea * China * Latvia * Finland * Georgia * Mongolia * Kazakhstan * Belarus * Azerbaijan 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%. Hey you are missing Mauritius! Nice game. Would be great if the gameplay moved on to the next country after a correct or wrong answer, without the need to hit the "Continue" button. Got 182/195! Hate the Oceania and Caribbean for always making me lose points in quizzes :D I am adding Mauritius Well done! What are these types of web apps that have no backend called? You still need the CDN, so they're not classically serverless (https://www.sqlite.org/serverless.html) Static? Jamstack https://jamstack.org/ 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. Cool one, especially for kids. It'd go well with naming the capital city, too. You might like Worldle and Flagle too. Clickable: https://worldle.teuteuf.fr/, https://www.flagle.io/ These both seem to be one per day, so you can't sit there and do a whole bunch in a row. 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) Oh irony is that first country I had when visiting the site was Palestine. Can you explain how that makes it ironic? Because it's not recognized as a State by Israel and a few other countries. It's a big game of cat, mouse, pride, and political points. -> Around 30 member states of the UN also fail to recognize the statehood of Israel... And because that fact is quite salient in current geopolitical affairs. There are couple of entities in the game whose statehood is debated / contested. 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. Absolutely Taiwan and Kosovo would be some other examples. I'm guessing this was inspired by the following thread (by Derek Sivers)? 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 got 128, which I guess isn't too bad. I'm just totally hopeless when it comes to most of Africa, and there's just way too many small island states. You can practice here! https://www.youdontknowafrica.com/ 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. Very cool. Are you collecting data on guesses? Would be interesting to see a ranking of countries by how many people can ID them A hint with the capital would be nice, especially for the tiny island nations. Otherwise I thoroughly enjoyed it! (129/195) Btw on safari on iOS long press the image will show the name of the country from the Wikipedia link 155/195. Struggled with Pacific and Caribbean island nations, and some of Africa. Very nice and well executed. Would love to be able to zoom in a bit. Thank you for highlighting my ignorance of geography :) Keep up the great work. Good work. I couldn’t name 98% of the countries. Realised my geography sucks Fun game! That material UI looks dated and clunky though. nice ! I have a big problem with pacific island, central america and subsaharan africa why is south korea another shade of green when the question is north korea? Good example but what adult doesn’t know all the countries of the world? troll much? 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 you lost me at the drop down on mobile. I'd suggest on mobile just having a selection of four to eight options that you can touch with your finger. Nice game :) Why's it so slow? When I press Continue it takes like 1 second to load the next country? It's like 195 jpegs, just pre-load them please. I can't continue like this after 3 countries, it's too tedious.
https://worldle.teuteuf.fr/
https://www.flagle.io/
