Size It Up: Geography

Why your mental map is wrong

Nearly everything you know about the size of countries came from a flat map, and a flat map has to distort something. The usual choice preserves shape and sacrifices area, which inflates everything far from the equator. Greenland is the famous victim in reverse: it looks continental, but its north to south span is about 2,651 km against roughly 7,887 km for Africa on the same axis, so Africa is close to three times longer top to bottom. Nothing on this board is projected that way. Each outline is placed at its real span beside a shape whose size you already have a feel for, and the gap between those two pictures is usually the whole difficulty of the round.

What is being measured in each round

One dimension per object, marked by the dotted guide, never area. For a country that means either its east to west width or its north to south height, whichever the outline is recorded on: Russia is judged across 8,082 km of width, while Greenland and Africa are judged on height. A river is measured on the span it covers, not the winding length of its channel, so the Nile appears as a 3,925 km north to south reach. A waterfall is measured on its drop, which is why Angel Falls sits at 979 m and the tallest section of Victoria Falls at 108 m.

The pool holds 118 outlines and mixes scales deliberately, from Malta at 35 km across and Greater London at 58 km to Lake Superior at 590 km, Alaska at 3,636 km and the Caspian Sea at 1,166 km. That range is why a round can feel trivial and the next one impossible: judging Belgium against France is a short step, while judging Andorra, 31 km across, against Canada at 5,395 km is a leap of more than two orders of magnitude with no landmark in between.

Once today's five are done, the daily game moves to animals, machines and buildings, Pop Culture takes on invented things at their stated size, and the archive holds every earlier geography set. The outlines themselves are traced from open mapping data, and each source is named on the sources page.