Draw the country from memory

You know Italy is a boot and Chile is long and thin. But could you draw them? Border Recall gives you a country’s name and an empty canvas. Sketch the outline, then watch the real border draw itself over your line. The closer the two shapes match, the more points you score.

A game is five countries. Press Play again for five more whenever you like, or share your result as a link so a friend can try the same five.

Scoring: how close is close enough?

Before anything is compared, your drawing and the real outline are centred and scaled to the same size. Drawing small, large or off to one side costs nothing. Two things then decide the score: how closely your line follows the real border (60%), and how much of the two shapes overlap (40%).

Here is how different drawings of Italy score:

Proportions and direction matter much more than small details. A country drawn too wide, or turned on its side, loses most of its points even if every bay is in the right place.

Why country shapes are hard to draw

Most of us store a country as a handful of features: a boot, a long coast, a pointed tip. We rarely store the proportions between them, so a remembered outline often comes out too fat, too short or missing a corner. Drawing it, rather than picking it from a list, shows exactly which part of your mental map is fuzzy.

Web maps add a second trap. Most of them use the Mercator projection, which enlarges places more the further they are from the equator. The north of a tall country such as Norway or Sweden looks bigger than its south, and Canada and Iceland look far larger than they are. Border Recall shows each country on a map centred on that country, closer to how it looks in an atlas.

How to draw a country better

Start with the longest edge

Draw the coastline or border you are surest of first, such as Chile’s Pacific coast or Norway’s west coast, then hang the rest of the shape on it.

Get the proportions before the details

Ask how many times taller than wide the country is. In this game Chile’s outline is about 5 times taller than it is wide, while Cuba is about 3 times wider than tall.

Count the big corners

Spain is roughly a square, with Portugal along its west side. India is a triangle pointing south below a wider north. Counting three or four main corners gets you most of the way.

Do not forget the islands

Big islands belong to the shape. The table above shows what leaving out Sicily and Sardinia does to Italy.

Learn from the reveal

Look at where the green line leaves yours. Misses tend to repeat in the same places, so noticing one makes the next drawing better.

Shapes in numbers

• The tallest, thinnest outlines in the game: Chile, Sweden, Portugal.
• The widest: Cuba, Turkey, United States.
• Canada has the most separate shapes to draw, 11 including its largest islands.

Border Recall in the classroom

Drawing a country takes under a minute, which makes it a quick warm-up for a geography lesson. Ask students to sketch a country before you show a map, then compare the drawings with the reveal.

• Which part did most people get wrong? Why might that be?
• Which neighbouring countries or seas would help you place that edge?
• How does the shape on a Mercator web map differ from the one in the game?

Which countries are in the game?

34 countries from every inhabited continent:

• Europe: Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Poland, Greece, Norway, Sweden, Finland, United Kingdom, Ireland, Iceland
• Asia: Japan, South Korea, India, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Vietnam, Thailand
• Africa: South Africa, Egypt, Kenya, Madagascar
• North America: Mexico, United States, Canada, Cuba
• South America: Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru
• Oceania: Australia, New Zealand

The United States is the lower 48 states, and France and Norway use their mainland outlines. Small islands are left out, large ones are included.

Questions about Border Recall

More games like Border Recall

If you like testing your mental map, try a different kind of hunch.