I'm guessing this was inspired by the following thread (by Derek Sivers)?
Show HN: Name That Nation
81–90 of 116 posts
Re: Show HN: Name That Nation
#82Nice, 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.
Re: Show HN: Name That Nation
#83You can make this more educative by showing 4 or 5 options to choose from for a particular country.
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!
Re: Show HN: Name That Nation
#84My 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
Re: Show HN: Name That Nation
#85I 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.
Re: Show HN: Name That Nation
#86I 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.
That confused me as well
Re: Show HN: Name That Nation
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 independen…
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...
Re: Show HN: Name That Nation
#88I 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…
Oh, another suggestion: show the country and let them name the capital!
Re: Show HN: Name That Nation
#89How 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.
Re: Show HN: Name That Nation
#90This 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 beau…
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.)