We Counted 67,000 Answers: The Geography Questions People Get Wrong Most
October 26, 2026 ยท 5 min read
Every time someone plays a map, flag or capital game on DodoThinks, the game records one small, anonymous fact: which question it asked, and whether the answer was right. When the answer is wrong, it also records what the player picked instead.
Since mid-September 2026, players have given almost 67,000 of those answers. That is enough to stop guessing about what people find hard in geography and start counting it. This article is the overview. Each section links to a deeper look at one map or game, with the full numbers.
The short version
- Most mistakes are not random. When people get a country wrong, they usually click its neighbour, a country with a similar name, or a bigger country next to a small one.
- Big, famous places are easy everywhere. Brazil's flag was named correctly 99% of the time. Chihuahua, Mexico's largest state, was found 91% of the time. Hakkari, the far south-east corner of Turkey, 97%.
- Small places squeezed between big ones are the hardest. Slovenia, Moldova, Lebanon, Jordan, Querรฉtaro and Drenthe all fall in that group.
- Islands far from "their" region confuse people most. Comoros on the map of the Arab world, Puerto Rico on the map of North America and the Falkland Islands on the map of South America have some of the lowest scores we have.
Which games are hardest?
Here is the share of right answers on some of the games with the most play. The lower the number, the harder players found it.
| Game | Answers | Right |
|---|---|---|
| North America map (Central America and the Caribbean) | 265 | 42% |
| Africa map | 1,166 | 49% |
| French dรฉpartements | 832 | 49% |
| Czech regions (kraje) | 533 | 59% |
| Asia map | 918 | 59% |
| Mexico's 32 states | 3,214 | 69% |
| Polish voivodeships | 2,252 | 70% |
| Spanish provinces | 2,077 | 70% |
| Europe map | 11,264 | 73% |
| Turkey's 81 provinces | 3,069 | 73% |
| Provinces of the Netherlands | 2,729 | 74% |
| Guess the Flag | 4,650 | 76% |
| Italy's 20 regions | 2,199 | 80% |
| Capital cities | 2,643 | 82% |
Two things stand out. Flags and capitals score higher than maps, partly because those games give you four options to choose from, while a map gives you the whole map. And the hardest maps are not the biggest ones. The North America map has only 17 places to find, yet players find fewer than half of them, because most of the 17 are small Central American and Caribbean countries.
The four patterns behind most mistakes
1. Neighbours that look alike
The single most common mistake on our Europe map is clicking Romania when asked for Bulgaria (28 times). The Baltic states are a close second: Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania were mixed up with each other 87 times in total. On the Dutch provinces map, Noord-Holland and Zuid-Holland were swapped 47 times.
These are places that sit side by side, have similar sizes and, on a blank map, similar shapes. The fix is to learn them as a set, in order: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania from north to south; Romania above the Danube, Bulgaria below it.
2. Names that sound alike
Poland has a voivodeship called Lubelskie in the far east and one called Lubuskie in the far west. Players mixed them up 34 times, in both directions equally. In Italy, Marche and Abruzzo were swapped 32 times. In Spain, people looking for รvila, near Madrid, clicked รlava, in the Basque Country far to the north.
Here the map is not the problem. The names are. A memory hook for the name works better than staring at the map.
3. Small places next to big ones
When people miss a small country, the click usually lands on the big country beside it. Cyprus went to Greece 28 times. Lebanon went to Syria 13 times. Mexico City went to the State of Mexico, which wraps around it, 12 times. Bahrain went to Qatar 10 times.
4. Islands far from home
Comoros is the hardest of the 22 countries on our map of the Arab world: players found it only 26% of the time. Many looked for it near Somalia or Yemen, but it sits between Mozambique and Madagascar. On the North America map, none of the 16 players asked for Puerto Rico found it. People tend to search for a country near the others in its group, and islands do not follow that rule.
The flags and capitals people miss
On Guess the Flag, the hardest flags are mostly territories and lookalikes: Papua New Guinea (25% right), American Samoa (31%), Mauritania (33%, which added red stripes to its flag in 2017) and Luxembourg (50%, whose flag looks almost exactly like the Netherlands'). The most common flag mix-up of all is the one you would expect: New Zealand and Australia.
For capitals, the trouble spot is Europe. Belgrade, Ljubljana, Copenhagen, Riga and Oslo are all answered wrongly more often than Bangkok. One surprise: several players picked Stockholm as the capital of Switzerland. Swiss and Swedish are easy to swap when you are going fast.
Read the full breakdowns
Each of these articles looks at one game, with the full table and the mix-ups behind it:
- The European countries people can't find on a map
- The flags people confuse most
- The capital cities people get wrong
- Africa, Asia, Central America and the Caribbean and South America
- The US states people can't find
- The map of the Arab world
- Country maps: Mexico, Turkey, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Italy, France and Czechia
How we counted
The numbers come from answers given on DodoThinks between 18 September and 26 October 2026, by players from all over the world playing in 19 languages. We count each answer once, right or wrong, and we only ever look at totals, never at individual players. Places with very few answers are left out of the tables, and the numbers will shift as more people play. We will update these articles as they do.
If you want to see how you compare, pick any game and play a round. Every answer you give becomes part of the next update.