Guess the Country by Shape

The famous shapes carry most players through the first few rounds: Italy's boot with Sicily at the toe, Chile's 4,300 km ribbon, India's diamond, Vietnam's S-curve, Japan's arc of islands, Norway's spoon, the United Kingdom, Cuba's crocodile. After that it comes down to coastlines and corners.

Look for one distinctive edge rather than the whole outline. Croatia curls like a boomerang around Bosnia. Somalia is a sharp 7. Portugal is an almost perfect rectangle. Turkey is a wide rectangle with a horn at the west end. Egypt and Libya are near-squares with a straight southern border; Egypt has the Sinai triangle on its east side. Landlocked countries with straight colonial borders, such as Mali, Niger and Chad, are the hardest; for those, Chad is the tall one, Niger the wide one with a flat northern edge, and Mali the one whose southern half narrows into a stalk.