Guess the Flag
Fifteen national flags, hidden under foil and reframed every round so you never know which corner you are scraping.
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scratched
Fifteen national flags, hidden under foil and reframed every round so you never know which corner you are scraping.
Flags chosen for how different they are from one another rather than for how famous the country is: Nordic crosses, star fields, a crescent, a taegeuk and one plain red disc. Each one is drawn rather than photographed, from an open source set released under the MIT licence, so the geometry is exact rather than approximate.
The card is square and the flag fills it, which means you are looking at the middle of the flag rather than the whole of it. On top of that, every round rotates and zooms the picture slightly, so nobody can learn that the answer always sits in the same spot.
Among the names you will meet here: Japan, Canada, South Korea, Jamaica and Switzerland.
A flag is mostly flat colour, and flat colour survives the blur much better than a face does. That sounds like it would make the category easy. It does not, because the three wrong answers are always flags that share the same colours or the same structure. Scratch a corner of Sweden and you have also scratched a corner of Finland, Denmark and Iceland.
Where a flag carries an emblem, the emblem is small and lives in one place. Open the wrong half of the card and you can sit looking at plain red for a long and expensive time.
Go through the middle. Most flags that are hard to tell apart differ in the centre, and one diagonal swipe across the card tells you more than four careful dabs in a corner.
Your score is 100 minus the percentage of the card you scratched. A wrong name scores nothing at all, however little you used. The full rules, the badge bands and an explanation of why the picture stays blurry are on the main page.