The rules
- Places. The 193 UN members, Vatican City, Palestine and Kosovo (Australia recognises all three), and Western Sahara. Territories such as Greenland, French Guiana, Gibraltar and Hong Kong are places of their own, not part of another country. So is Taiwan.
- Neighbours share a land border. A border along a river or through a lake counts, such as DR Congo and Tanzania in Lake Tanganyika.
- Bridges and tunnels between two countries don't count, such as the Øresund Bridge, the Channel Tunnel and the causeways to Bahrain and Singapore. The start screen has a switch to count them.
- Inside one country, its own bridges, tunnels and canal crossings are fine: across the Suez Canal in Egypt, the Bosphorus in Türkiye or the Panama Canal. Open sea isn't: Great Britain to Northern Ireland, peninsular Malaysia to Borneo, or between Indonesia's islands. So no land route reaches Indonesia, Brunei, Timor-Leste or Papua New Guinea from mainland Asia.
- Pieces of a country. A route can start or end in any part of a country. A country in the middle has to be crossed on one piece of its land. So Poland → Russia → Finland doesn't work: Poland borders Kaliningrad, which is cut off from the rest of Russia. The same goes for Nakhchivan (Azerbaijan), Ceuta and Melilla (Spain), Cabinda (Angola), Musandam (Oman) and Gaza.
- Disputed borders follow who holds the ground, as Natural Earth's maps do. Israel holds the Golan Heights, so Israel and Syria are neighbours. Kashmir is split as India, Pakistan and China hold it, so Pakistan borders China and India doesn't border Afghanistan. Abkhazia and South Ossetia count as Georgia, Northern Cyprus as Cyprus, and Somaliland as Somalia. A route that uses a disputed border says so.
- The map decides, not whether a border is open today. Some borders are closed or run through war zones. This is a game about the map, not travel advice.
Easy level
Easy shows every country next door to where your route is now, as the first letter and the number of letters, such as T… 7. When two of them start the same way and have the same length, it shows more letters (Ka… 10 and Ky… 10), but never more than half the name. Iran and Iraq both show Ir… 4. The clues follow the piece of land you're on: after Poland → Russia, only Kaliningrad's neighbour shows. Tap a clue to type its letters. The clues don't say which way is shortest.
One exception
Russia has held Crimea since 2014, and Natural Earth draws it with Russia. This map draws Ukraine's recognised borders, as Australia does. It changes no route, because Russia and Ukraine border each other either way.
Where the map comes from
The shapes are Natural Earth's 1:50 million map. The game finds neighbours from the lines two places share, then fixes what that map can't show: Gibraltar, Ceuta and Melilla, the Botswana–Zambia border at Kazungula and Hans Island, where Canada and Greenland have shared a land border since 2022. Hans Island is cut off from the rest of Canada by sea, so only a route that starts in Canada can reach Greenland. A breadth-first search finds the fewest crossings and every shortest route.
About this game, for teachers