Outline#1

How to play

Outline is a daily geography game for people who think they know what countries look like. Three tracings of the same country sit on a cartographer's light table. One is the real border. The other two have been quietly redrawn.

1. Read the country's name, then compare the three sheets. Tap a sheet to see it large.
2. Press and drag on the large sheet to look through the loupe.
3. Pick the sheet you think is the real outline. The fakes are then revealed, with the real border traced over them in red so you can see what changed.
4. Five countries a day. The first two are well known; the fakes get subtler every round.

The fakes are made by one of these edits:

• stretching or squashing the whole country by 8 to 15 percent along one axis,
• flipping one stretch of the border end to end,
• adding or removing a small island,
• making part of a coastline wavier, or smoothing it out,
• pulling a peninsula or corner a little further out.

Every country is drawn at the same simplified scale, so a border looking blocky isn't a clue: all three sheets share it. Far-off territories such as Alaska and Svalbard are left off.