The micro-states: the smallest countries in the world

A micro-state is a sovereign country whose territory or population is negligible on a world scale. There is no official definition, but common usage keeps states under a thousand square kilometres or under a million inhabitants. Among the game's 195 countries, about fifteen qualify.

The smallest countries in the world

Why they exist

Three different histories hide behind those figures.

The European survivals. Vatican City, San Marino, Monaco, Liechtenstein and Andorra are leftovers of feudal fragmentation that slipped through the nineteenth-century unifications. San Marino claims to be the oldest republic in the world, founded in 301. The Vatican is the most recent: created in 1929 by the Lateran Treaty, it holds fewer than a thousand inhabitants and under half a square kilometre — the size of an urban park.

The decolonised islands. Nauru, Tuvalu, the Marshall Islands, Palau, Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Kitts and Nevis: territories that became independent between the 1960s and the 1990s without ever reaching a critical size. Nauru is a textbook case — the island was once among the richest countries per capita thanks to its phosphates, before they ran out.

The city-states. Singapore and, in its way, Malta: tiny, but densely populated and economically major.

The problem they pose in a quiz

A random draw does not weight by population. In a round of 195 equally likely countries, Tuvalu has exactly the same chance of appearing as India — one holding 9,600 people and the other 1.45 billion. Micro-states thus account for nearly 8 % of possible questions, for 0.02 % of the world's population.

That is why a well-read player plateaus: they know the countries that matter perfectly, and systematically miss the ones that do not. Revising the fifteen micro-states is, in pure return, the best investment available — fifteen names for nearly a tenth of the game.

Their other quirk is technical: on a map they are too small to tap. 3D Globe mode therefore shows them as tappable dots once you zoom in far enough, without which they would be unplayable.

Frequently asked

Read next

• Landlocked and doubly landlocked countries
• The countries of Europe
• The 3D globe game
• The hardest countries to place