Criteria
Criteria: Countries of Europe
Ten European countries, nine criteria. Each criterion rules out one of the countries still standing: click it, and keep going until one country meets them all. Borders, the EU, sizes, positions and letters, in a new round every time.
- Standing
- 10
- Score
- 0/10
- Time
- Time left: 5:00
Each criterion, in order, rules out exactly one of the countries still standing: click that country. The criteria add up, so after nine clicks one country is left that meets them all: click it to finish. The buttons are in alphabetical order. One wrong click is a mine and ends the round.
Finding your next challenge…
How it works, data and sources
Every round is generated for you: ten countries and nine criteria. Each criterion, in order, rules out exactly one of the countries still standing, and you click that one. The criteria add up, so the last country standing meets all nine: clicking it is the tenth and final step. The whole checklist is shown from the start, with the current criterion highlighted; the reveal at the end says which country each criterion ruled out and why. One wrong click ends the round. A challenge link replays the same round in the same language.
Each round is checked as it is made: at every step the criterion is clearly false for exactly one country still standing and clearly true for all the others, so there is always exactly one right click, and nothing that could be argued ever decides it. A country named in a criterion is never one of the ten buttons. Figures only count when they are clear: “more than 10 million people” means at least a quarter more (under 8 million is clearly fewer), and “more populous” or “larger than” another country means at least one and a half times as much.
“Completely west of Bulgaria” means that every part of the country lies west of every part of Bulgaria, by at least 1° of longitude, on a world map (longitudes from 180° W to 180° E). The same goes for east, north and south, and for “completely north of the Equator”. The extents come from the Natural Earth 1:50m country shapes, and a position only counts when it holds both for the whole countries (outlying islands and overseas departments included, such as French Guiana or the Canary Islands) and for their largest landmass. Countries that reach across the 180° meridian (Russia, the United States, Fiji, Kiribati and New Zealand) are never placed east or west of anything; Morocco, India and Pakistan, whose extent depends on Western Sahara or Kashmir, are never placed at all.
Borders, landlocked countries, areas and populations follow the pinned CIA World Factbook snapshot of our ranking quizzes; island nations are the countries of our island countries quiz; continents follow our other world quizzes (based on the UN geoscheme); the EU has 27 members; capitals are those of our capitals quizzes.
Anything that could be argued is left out: a transcontinental country (such as Russia, Turkey or Egypt) is never ruled in or out by its continent, nor Spain, France and Portugal by Africa; Central America and the Caribbean are never ruled in or out of North America; borders through an overseas territory or Western Sahara, the tiny Botswana–Zambia and Turkey–Azerbaijan borders, and the borders of Kosovo, Palestine and Israel neither count nor rule out; the Caspian countries count as neither landlocked nor coastal. Capital criteria skip countries with several or disputed capitals (such as South Africa, Bolivia, the Netherlands or Switzerland), and there is no “the capital is the largest city” criterion.
Letter criteria read the country names on the buttons, in this language, and the capitals’ names as in our capitals quizzes. A letter with an accent is not the same letter, and a name that has it only with an accent (É for E, Ö for O) is never ruled in or out by it; Y counts as neither a vowel nor a consonant; a name with a hyphen or an apostrophe is never counted in words; and a capital whose name is close to its country’s (Kuwait City, Tunis) is never said to be named differently. Because names differ between languages, the same challenge link can give a different round in another language.