The hardest countries to place on a map

Ask someone to place France on a map: they will manage. Ask them to place Kiribati, and they will probably point at the ocean and hope. Between the two there is no difference in geographic difficulty — Kiribati is no more hidden than France — but a difference in exposure.

What makes a country “invisible”

A country enters our memory through four channels: its population, its economic weight, tourism, and its presence online. A country that fails on all four disappears, whatever its area. That is why Kazakhstan, the ninth-largest country on Earth, is better located than Papua New Guinea, and why Monaco — two square kilometres — is better known than Chad.

GeoG measures that effect with an internal familiarity indicator: a normalised blend of population, GDP, tourist arrivals and internet penetration. It says nothing about a country's importance; it estimates the odds a player has already come across it. It is that indicator which drives the difficulty of story mode and the drawing of questions.

The thirty least familiar countries

Here is the tail of the ranking, from least to most familiar. Two things stand out: Oceania occupies almost the whole bottom of the table, and the Caribbean supplies most of the rest.

How to learn them

The worst method is to revise them one by one in alphabetical order: they have no anchor, so there is nothing to hold on to. The right method is to take them in geographic blocks, leaning on what you already know.

• Micronesia — Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Kiribati: north of the equator, east of the Philippines. Five countries, one zone.
• Polynesia — Samoa, Tonga, Tuvalu: further east and south, between Fiji and Tahiti.
• Melanesia — Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji: north-east of Australia, in an arc.
• The Lesser Antilles — Antigua, Dominica, Saint Lucia, Grenada, Saint Vincent, Saint Kitts: a chain running north to south, between Puerto Rico and Venezuela.
• The Gulf of Guinea — São Tomé and Príncipe, Equatorial Guinea: two states in the elbow of Africa.

Five blocks, about twenty countries, and most of the problem is solved. The 3D globe is the most effective mode for this exercise: unlike a flat map, it shows real distances, and you finally grasp that Kiribati spreads across more than three thousand kilometres.

Frequently asked

Read next

• The 3D globe game
• The micro-states
• The countries of Oceania
• Studying geography: where to start