How to play Country Draw

Quick start

One round in five steps

1. Choose a map. Use World for countries or U.S. States for the fifty states.
2. Read the prompt. The place you need to draw appears above the map.
3. Trace the border. Press and drag with a mouse, trackpad, stylus, or finger. You may use more than one stroke.
4. Submit the drawing. The button becomes available after the game has enough points to judge your line.
5. Study the reveal. Green shows the real border and dashed coral shows your attempt. Review the score before moving on.

There is no timer in practice play, so accuracy matters more than speed. If a line goes wrong, use Undo stroke to remove only the latest stroke or Clear to restart the whole attempt. Once submitted, the drawing is locked so the comparison stays honest.

Read the result

How the accuracy score works

The game converts the real border and your drawing into pixel masks at the current map size. A twelve-pixel tolerance surrounds the real border, which means a slightly shaky finger or a line that sits just beside the boundary can still count. The score rewards overlap while balancing two common errors: missing part of the border and drawing too much line away from it.

Accuracy

The overall similarity between your line and the tolerated real border.

Matched

The share of compared pixels where your line and the target region overlap.

Missed

Target-border pixels that your drawing did not cover.

Extra

Your pixels outside the tolerated target region.

A larger outline is not automatically safer. It may cover more of the true border, but distant edges increase Extra. A very small outline has the opposite problem: less Extra, but more Missed. The best result comes from placing the shape correctly and preserving its proportions rather than tracing every coastal detail.

Drawing strategy

Build the outline from anchors

Before touching the map, identify two or three anchors. For Italy, those might be the wide north, the heel, and the toe. For Chile, they are the long north-to-south axis and the narrow width. For California, use the straight eastern side, the diagonal southeast, and the Pacific coast. Anchors prevent a familiar silhouette from drifting into the wrong scale or location.

Draw the longest structural edge first. Straight international borders and broad coastlines are easier to place than small bays or peninsulas. Add the distinctive gesture second, then close the shape with a simplified return line. Islands can be separate strokes. At world scale, trying to reproduce every island or inlet usually adds noise without improving the score.

After the reveal, look for one useful correction instead of memorizing the whole green outline. Was the country too wide? Did its northern edge sit too far south? Was the state tilted in the wrong direction? Make that single correction in the next round. Repeated short attempts create a more reliable mental map than staring at the answer for a long time.

Choose your practice

World mode or U.S. States?

World mode uses an Equal Earth projection so countries keep a balanced global context. It is best for practicing relative location, continental scale, coastlines, and international borders. Start with recognizable shapes such as Egypt, Italy, Chile, or Portugal, then move toward larger or more irregular countries.

U.S. States mode uses a separate map built from Census-derived us-atlas boundary data. It includes the fifty states and excludes Washington, D.C. and the five inhabited territories. This mode is useful for classroom geography, state-location review, and comparing similar rectangular states that differ through one river, corner, or coastline.

Phone and tablet

Drawing on a touch screen

Use a fingertip or stylus directly on the map. The canvas prevents page scrolling only while you draw, and the map resizes to the available screen width. Rotate a small phone to landscape if you want more room for narrow countries. Short, deliberate strokes are often easier than one long gesture, especially near screen edges. Undo works per stroke, so breaking a difficult outline into sections also makes corrections faster.

Common questions

What new players usually ask