How to Play Meridian Quiz: The Daily Geography Quiz Game

Meridian Quiz is a geography quiz. Fifteen questions, four options each, one right answer. Tap an option and the game tells you immediately whether you were right, showing the correct answer if you were not, and then moves on. A hundred points a correct answer makes fifteen hundred a clean sweep.

The questions come from a bank of more than five thousand, and the bank is not a list somebody typed out. It is expanded from verified reference tables - every sovereign country with its capital, continent, currency, ISO codes, dialling code, main official language, largest city and land neighbours, plus first-level states and provinces, rivers, mountains, lakes, deserts, islands, seas, straits, landmarks and major cities. Each fact is written down in exactly one place, so a whole family of questions is right or wrong together rather than one at a time.

There is no clock. The elapsed time is measured and shown at the end, but it buys nothing. Meridian Quiz is the one puzzle in the daily lineup that rewards knowing the answer rather than knowing it fast.

How to play Meridian Quiz

1. Choose Daily, which serves the same fifteen questions to everybody in your timezone all day, or Quick Game for fifteen more you can replay as often as you like.
2. Read the question at the top of the screen and pick one of the four options below it. On a phone the options stack into a single column; on anything wider they sit in a two by two grid.
3. The moment you tap, the option you chose turns green if it was right and red if it was not - and if it was not, the correct option lights up green beside it so you can see what the answer actually was.
4. The options lock during that pause, so you cannot tap the newly revealed correct answer and score the question after the fact. A right answer moves on quickly; a wrong one holds a little longer, because there is something to read.
5. Every correct answer is worth a hundred points, and nothing is deducted for a wrong one. The bar under the question counter shows how far through the fifteen you are.
6. At the end you get your score out of fifteen hundred, a breakdown of how you did by topic, and - in Daily mode - a streak and a spoiler-free result card you can paste into a chat.

Strategy and tips

• Answer the question that was asked. A surprising number of misses are people reading "largest city" as "capital" - and the two differ far more often than most of us expect. Turkey, Tanzania, Ivory Coast, Morocco, Switzerland and Canada all have a largest city that is not their capital.
• Use the distractors. Every wrong option is drawn from the same kind of thing as the answer, and often from the same continent, so if three of the four options are African currencies and one is not, the odd one out is rarely the answer.
• Country codes reward a moment of thought rather than a guess. The two-letter code is usually the obvious abbreviation of the country name in English, with a handful of famous exceptions: Switzerland is CH, Germany is DE and the United Kingdom is GB even though its domain is dot uk.
• Flags are worth learning as families. The Nordic cross, the pan-African red-gold-green and the pan-Arab red-white-black-green all group a dozen countries each, so recognising the family narrows four options to one or two almost instantly.
• There is no clock, so read the whole question and all four options before you commit. The only thing speed buys you here is a smaller number on a stat line nobody is ranked by.

What makes Meridian Quiz different

It is knowledge, not reflex. Every other daily on this site is scored against a clock or a move count - Spot It times your eyes, Blink Shift times your memory, Towers of Hanoi counts your moves. Meridian Quiz asks whether you know the answer and then gets out of the way, which is why it sits alongside them in the daily lineup rather than competing with them.

The bank is generated from reference data rather than hand-written, so its facts are consistent by construction. Change where a capital is written down and every question about that country changes with it - there is no second copy to forget.

Reverse questions are only asked when the answer is unique. "Which country uses the euro?" has twenty right answers, so the game never asks it; "which country uses the Kenyan shilling?" has one, so it does. The same rule is why every question about a state or province names its country: a bare Georgia is also a country, and a bare Victoria is also a capital city.

A wrong answer costs nothing but the point. There are no penalties, no lives and no way to end a run early, so the fifteenth question is exactly as worth answering as the first even if the first fourteen went badly.

It teaches while you play. The correct answer is shown on every miss, and the end screen breaks your result down by topic, so you leave knowing which part of the world you are weakest on rather than just how many you got.

Frequently asked questions

More to read

• Free daily puzzle games to play in your browser: A shortlist by puzzle type - word, logic, colour, memory - of dailies that take five minutes and are the same for everyone.
• Quick games for standups: five-minute team games: Short enough to fit in the gap at the top of a standup without becoming the standup.