Flag Quiz

The set is all 195 countries, and the score keeps count as you go. Run it a region at a time in your head: by the third or fourth pass, the flags you keep missing will have sorted themselves into a short list.

Four ways to play

• Choice, the default: one flag, four country names from the same region. Pick one.
• Type: the flag is shown on its own and you type the country. Older names such as Ivory Coast, Swaziland and Turkey are accepted, and one small typo is forgiven on longer names.
• Pick the flag: the reverse question. We name a country and you choose its flag from four.
• Learn: no score. Hover or tap any country to see its name, capital and flag. A good first look at a set before a scored run.

Learn flags in families

Nearly 200 flags is a lot to hold as separate pictures. It gets much easier once you notice that many of them come in families, built from the same colors for the same historical reasons. Inside a family you only need to learn the one detail that differs.

• Nordic crosses: Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland all put an off-center cross on a plain field. Denmark is red with white, Sweden blue with yellow, Finland white with blue. Norway and Iceland are the pair to watch: Norway is red with a blue cross edged in white, Iceland blue with a red cross edged in white.
• Pan-African colors: red, gold and green, taken from Ethiopia's flag. Ghana adds a black star, Senegal a green star, Cameroon a yellow one, while Mali and Guinea are plain vertical tricolors in opposite orders.
• Pan-Arab colors: red, white, black and green. Egypt, Iraq and Yemen share red, white and black stripes and are told apart by the white band: Egypt has a gold eagle, Iraq a line of green script, Yemen nothing at all. Sudan adds a green triangle at the hoist, and Jordan and Palestine differ by a single white star in Jordan's red triangle.
• The Gran Colombia trio: Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela all use yellow, blue and red bands. Colombia's yellow band is double height, Ecuador's flag is the same layout with a coat of arms, and Venezuela's bands are equal, with an arc of white stars.

The lookalikes that cost points

Some pairs are close enough that only shade or proportion separates them. Chad and Romania are near-identical blue, yellow and red verticals. Indonesia and Monaco are both red over white, and Poland is the same two colors the other way up. Ireland and Côte d'Ivoire use green, white and orange in mirror order, and the green is at the hoist on Ireland's.

When the region-based wrong answers start to feel easy, the hard flag quiz is built from pairs like these. If you are starting from scratch, the easy flag quiz covers the 40 flags most people should know first.

Other flag quizzes for other jobs

This page is for recognizing a flag. Two sibling quizzes train the other skills. Guess the flag gives you a country's name and asks you to pick its flag, which is harder than it sounds once the four options share colors. The flags of the world quiz puts all 195 flags on screen at once with no names, and you type countries from memory until the grid is full.

With a class

Choice mode works well on a projector: show the flag, read the four options and let the room vote before you click. The discussion about why it is not the other three is where the learning happens. Pick the flag makes a good second round, because recognizing a flag and picturing it from a name are different skills, and students are usually surprised by how far apart their two scores are.

All the flags in this quiz

Names and capitals: CIA World Factbook (final edition), checked against Wikidata and Natural Earth. Flags: flag-icons, each checked against Wikimedia Commons. See sources. Spotted a mistake? Tell us.