Timed flag typing

Geo Sprint: how to play

Race through a region’s flags against a stopwatch, or choose the built-in Geo Guess quiz for ten timed flag or outline questions.

Play Geo Sprint

What is Geo Sprint?

Geo Sprint also includes Geo Guess. Choose Guess the flag or Guess the outline, select Easy or Hard, and play ten rounds for up to 10,000 points. The back button returns you to the Geo Sprint selection screen.

Geo Sprint is a race against a stopwatch. You choose a region, the flags of its countries are shuffled, and they are shown to you one at a time. For each flag you type the name of the country. As soon as the spelling matches, the answer is accepted and the next flag moves up.

The clock does not run while you are looking at the first flag. It starts when you type your first character and stops when the last flag has been named or skipped. A sprint can be as short as the 12 flags of South America or as long as all 196 flags in the World sprint.

Sprints: World, Europe, North America, South America, Asia, Africa and Oceania
Flags per sprint: World 196, Africa 54, Asia 48, Europe 45, North America 23, Oceania 14, South America 12
Timer: Counts up from your first keystroke, shown to a tenth of a second
Skips: Unlimited, counted on the results screen
Lives: None

How to play

1Choose a sprint from the seven cards, each of which shows how many flags it contains.
2Look at the large flag labelled Now, with the next two flags shown smaller beside it as +1 and +2.
3Type the country name in the box, which starts the timer on your first character.
4Keep typing without pressing Enter, because the box clears by itself the moment the name is right.
5Press Skip if you cannot name a flag, and the game moves on to the next one.
6Read your final time on the results screen after the last flag, then press Play Again for a new shuffle of the same region.

Scoring

Time is the only score. The stopwatch counts up in minutes, seconds and tenths, and your result is the time from the first keystroke to the last flag. Lower is better.

There are no points and no lives. Wrong letters are not punished: nothing happens until what you have typed matches the country, so a mistake only costs the time it takes to correct it.

Skipping adds no time penalty, but each skip is counted and the total appears under your time on the results screen. A fair comparison between two runs needs both the time and the number of skips.

Tips

The timer waits for your first key. Use that pause to identify the three flags on screen before you touch the keyboard, and keep reading the +1 and +2 flags as you type.
Short forms save keystrokes. The game accepts uk, usa, drc, holland, burma and ivory coast, as well as older names such as czech republic, swaziland, macedonia and east timor.
Capital letters, accents and punctuation do not matter. "and" and "&" are treated the same, and so are "Saint" and "St", so type whichever is quicker for you.
In the Europe sprint, sort out the red, white and blue tricolours in advance: the Netherlands and Luxembourg differ in their shade of blue, while Russia, Slovakia and Slovenia share the same stripes and the last two add a coat of arms.
The Oceania sprint has only 14 flags, such as Fiji, Palau and Tuvalu. Use it to learn the Pacific flags before you attempt the World sprint. Cyprus is in the Europe sprint.

What you learn

The sprint trains two things at once: recognising a national flag at a glance, and recalling and spelling the name of the country quickly. Because you type the answer and do not pick it from a list, you cannot rely on elimination.

Questions and answers

When does the timer start?: When you type the first character of your first answer. If you press Skip before typing anything, the timer starts at that moment.
Does skipping a flag cost time?: No time is added. The number of flags you skipped is shown under your time on the results screen.
Is my best time saved?: No. The results screen shows the time for the run you have just finished, but the game does not keep a record of earlier runs. Write down a time you want to beat.