Flag Matching Game: How to Match Flags, Capitals and Shapes

A flag quiz shows you one flag and four names. A matching board shows you six or eight flags and all their names at once. That changes how you play: every pair you clear makes the rest of the board easier, and the last pair is free.

Our new Flag Matching Game works this way. Tap a flag, then the country it belongs to, and the pair clears. You can also match capitals to countries, or country outlines to their names, and pick one continent or the whole world.

Here is how to clear a board fast, and the flags that catch almost everyone.

The short version:

• Clear the pairs you are sure of first.
• Let the board do the work: the last few pairs answer themselves.
• On Hard, find the look-alike flags before you tap anything.
• In Memory, only the misses you could have avoided cost you.

How the game works

Half the tiles show flags and half show country names. Tap one tile, then the one that goes with it. A right pair turns green and clears. A wrong pair flashes red, and both countries lose their point.

There are four levels:

• Easy: 6 pairs from the 40 best-known countries.
• Medium: 8 pairs, with 73 more countries in the mix.
• Hard: 8 pairs from all 194 countries.
• Memory: 8 pairs, with every card face down.

There is no clock on screen, so take your time. Your score is the number of pairs you matched without a mistake. When the board is clear, you see how long it took, your best time on that device, and the pairs you got wrong, side by side.

Start with what you know

Before you tap anything, look over the whole board and find the pairs you are certain of. Japan, Canada and Brazil take a second each. Every sure pair takes two tiles off the board, and the fewer tiles are left, the easier the rest becomes.

This is the real trick of a matching game. If two flags and two names are left and you know one of them, you know both. So never guess early. A guess you get wrong costs two countries their point, but the same guess at the end, when only two tiles are left, cannot go wrong.

Hard: the look-alike flags

On Hard, the flag boards start with one or two families of flags that look almost the same, taken from our Flags That Look Alike pages. Each flag has one detail that gives it away:

• Chad and Romania. Chad's blue is the darker, indigo blue. Romania's is a brighter cobalt.
• Indonesia, Monaco and Poland. Indonesia and Monaco are both red over white, but Monaco's flag is almost square. Poland is the other way round: white on top, red below.
• The Netherlands and Luxembourg. The Netherlands has the dark blue. Luxembourg has a light sky blue and a longer flag.
• Senegal and Mali. Senegal has a green star in the middle. Mali has three plain stripes.
• Ireland and Côte d'Ivoire. Ireland has green at the flagpole. Côte d'Ivoire has orange at the flagpole.
• The Nordic crosses. Denmark is a white cross on red, Sweden a yellow cross on blue, and Finland a blue cross on white. Norway is a blue cross with a white border on red, and Iceland a red cross with a white border on blue.
• Slovenia and Slovakia. Slovenia has a small shield with Mount Triglav in the top corner. Slovakia has a big shield with a white double cross.
• Colombia, Ecuador and Venezuela. Colombia has no coat of arms. Ecuador has a coat of arms with a condor. Venezuela has three equal bands and an arc of eight white stars.
• Bulgaria and Hungary. Bulgaria is white, green and red from the top. Hungary is red, white and green.
• Haiti and Liechtenstein. Haiti has a coat of arms on a white square in the middle. Liechtenstein has a gold crown in the top corner.
• Qatar and Bahrain. Qatar is maroon with nine white points, and very long. Bahrain is red with five white points.

When a family is on the board, find its members first and match them using these details. For the flags our players miss most often, see The Flags People Confuse Most.

Capitals: the big-city traps

The capitals game leaves out the capitals that give their country away, such as Mexico City, Kuwait City and Singapore. What is left is full of traps where the most famous city is not the capital:

• Australia: Canberra, not Sydney.
• Canada: Ottawa, not Toronto.
• Turkey: Ankara, not Istanbul.
• Brazil: Brasília, not Rio de Janeiro.
• Nigeria: Abuja, not Lagos.
• Morocco: Rabat, not Casablanca.
• Vietnam: Hanoi, not Ho Chi Minh City.
• New Zealand: Wellington, not Auckland.

The famous city is never on the board, so if you catch yourself looking for Sydney, stop and look for Canberra.

Shapes: look at the edges

In the shapes game, every outline fills its own tile, so size gives nothing away: Russia and Belgium look the same size. Look at the coasts and corners instead. Italy is the boot, Chile is the long thin strip, and Norway is the jagged coast with a rounded end in the south.

Memory: how the score works

In Memory, all 16 cards start face down. Flag cards and name cards have different backs, so you always turn over one of each. If they match, they stay up. If not, they turn back over after a second.

You can't avoid misses while you explore, so they are free. A miss only costs a point when you could have known better: you had already seen the card that matched, or you turned over a card you had already seen. Work through the board row by row, so you remember where each card is, and say the names out loud as you turn them.

For teachers

Pick the pairs and the area, then set a class challenge from the Teachers page. Every pupil gets the same board, and the scores arrive on one class board. Capitals of Europe on Medium makes a good five-minute review, and Memory is a good game for younger classes.

Try it

Start with the Flag Matching Game on Easy, then try Hard once you can clear a board without a mistake. When the flags feel easy, switch to capitals or country shapes. To practise one flag at a time, Guess the Flag is the classic.