Show HN: Name That Nation (opens in new tab)

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!).

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

Its good, but I was expecting a rotate/zoom

I really like travle.earth: https://travle.earth/challenge/

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.

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.

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.

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.

What do the colors mean Why was North Korea in dark green and South Korea in light green, and which should I name?

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 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

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:

https://andys.org.uk/countryquiz/

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

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

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)

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.

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.

I'm guessing this was inspired by the following thread (by Derek Sivers)?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39169197

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.

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?

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.