Show HN: Learn where countries are on the world map with Spaced Repetition

Nice little game! One correction: Swaziland has been called Eswatini since 2018. Lots of websites still use the old name, unfortunately.

I boosted my geography knowledge by playing Sporcle, e.g. https://www.sporcle.com/games/g/world

What list did you use for the list of "countries"? (I only ask because the first one I got was Northern Cyprus which is only recognized by Turkey and not a UN state).

edit: I see the code is fetching from the following, which has 177 features:

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/holtzy/D3-graph-gallery/ma...

Nice job!

A few observations & thoughts:

- With remote islands somewhere in the oceans, the last zoom level isn't very effective since the map will essentially only show the island you're supposed to identify.

- The map's resolution could be higher.

- The challenge (top right) doesn't work for me in Firefox for Android. It always tells me I have guessed wrong (as if I had accidentally tapped somewhere on the map) when in reality I haven't even made a guess in the first place and was waiting for the game to tell me which country to identify.

Some Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish people may take issue with your definition of "England"

This is a great idea, though I feel like if you guessed the country accurately the first time I would like it move on to another country. That or a button that lets me skip to new countries. I know where Australia and it's a bit tedious to be forced into spaced repetition for it three times.

This is awesome, I got way more sucked into this than I expected. If you're open to adding more features, a "custom playlist" would be really cool. I'd love to drill myself on the Balkans or West Africa, for instance.

This is so cool. I modified the script so that the countries are a bit darker (#777), and I found that it helped the borders pop a lot more. It would probably be equally interesting to play this game with no borders at all.

Not to scope creep, but it would be great if users could pick from 1 or 2 themes. Or maybe just refactor it so that changing a global var from the javascript would let you change the colors.

edit: also the collective north and south poles take up about 60% of the zoomed out map. I bet you could crop most of antarctica and a significant portion of the upper northern hemisphere without degrading the experience.

A few thoughts after ~5 minutes:

* I like how the map moves around. It helps nail down relationships to neighbors * I don't mind a few extra "Where's canada", even though it's not that useful * I'd like the pause between answers be shorter. * Small countries are impossible to see when zoomed out on the first exposure, even when selected right. I find myself knowing the area it's in (ie, central america) but not which exact country. So selecting it right when zoomed out doesn't get me the correct answer.

Love this! Played Worldle (https://worldle.teuteuf.fr/) for a while and this would have been helpful.

Great application of spaced repetition beyond cards.

I am really enjoying this! I'll continue to use this for a while, and I really hope I'll learn more countries in the long term

Also, I absolutely love that it's so easy to start playing (no signup, no popups, etc)

Question: For the countries I know and select first time, I get them multiple times between countries. It's a bit odd to have to select England a couple of times, but the countries I don't know, I seem to get less often, or no repeats at all. Is this intended?

(edit) Question 2: Is there any scenario where you'd actually guess wrong more than once? After the first miss click, the country is highlighted. I don't see I'd ever get "You found country in 3 clicks".

This is an absolutely excellent way to learn, I am surprised at just how effective it was. I'd love a "manual" mode that let me discard countries/mark them to stay in rotation.