Flagle Unlimited

You see a flag cut into 9 pieces, with most of them covered by plum-coloured lids. Type a country or territory, pick it from the list and press Guess. Each guess is placed on a distance ladder and added to a dial that points toward the answer, and each wrong guess uncovers one more piece of the flag. Name it and the game is won; run out of guesses and the whole flag is shown with the answer under it. Press Next puzzle for a new flag, as often as you like.

Easy gives 8 guesses, starts with 2 pieces uncovered, prints the continent under the flag and picks from the 59 most populous countries whose flag we can use. Medium gives 6 guesses, starts with 1 piece and picks from 116 well-populated ones. Hard gives 6 guesses, starts with 1 piece and picks from all 223 flags we can use. On every level you may guess any of the 238 countries and territories in the game.

The covered pieces are the puzzle: a few colours and shapes are enough to rule out most flags, and every wrong guess earns you another look. The flag is cut into 9 pieces, three by three. Easy starts with 2 uncovered and Medium and Hard with 1, and each wrong guess uncovers one more. The order is set by the puzzle number, and the opening pieces are picked from the ones with more than one colour in them whenever the flag has such pieces, so a start is rarely a patch of plain red. Win or lose, all 9 pieces are uncovered at the end.

Distance is the straight-line distance over the Earth between a point in the middle of your guess and a point in the middle of the answer, rounded to 10 km, with miles in brackets. The arrow on the dial is the way to head from your guess toward the answer, as one of eight compass points. The percentage says how close you are: 100% is the answer itself, and it falls toward 0% the farther away you are, reaching 0% at 20,037 km, half the way around the Earth. For example, a guess of France when the answer is Germany is 700 km away, which is 96%, and Spain when the answer is France is 880 km (96%).

Yes. Press Next puzzle for another flag at the same level, with no sign-up and no daily limit. Easy draws from 59 flags, Medium from 116 and Hard from 223, and the ones you played most recently are skipped. Switch to Daily if you would rather have the one flag everybody gets today at each level.

No. The Dles is an independent site. We wrote this version ourselves, with our own look, our own levels and a new flag every time you press Next, and it is not affiliated with or endorsed by the original game’s makers.

At least two quite different games share the name. flagle.io covers a flag with a grid of pieces and uncovers one for every guess, and shows distance, direction and closeness after each one. flagle-game.com works another way: the parts of the hidden flag that overlap with the flag you guessed are revealed. This game is closest to the first idea, a flag uncovered piece by piece with distance, direction and closeness, but the board, the nine-piece grid, the levels and the code are our own.

Six, as the flagle.io page shows: it has six pieces over the flag and uncovers one per guess, and sets one flag a day. This version gives 6 guesses on Medium and Hard and 8 on Easy, covers the flag with 9 pieces, and you can keep playing after you finish.

The flags are the 4:3 SVG files of flag-icons (version 7.6.0) by Panayiotis Lipiridis, copyright 2013 and released under the MIT licence; the licence text is shipped with the files. We checked each flag against its page on Wikimedia Commons and only use as answers the 223 flags whose artwork is marked public domain or CC0 there. A flag that did not pass, or that is the same drawing as a bigger country’s, can still be guessed but is never the answer, so the guess list keeps all 238 countries and territories (15 of them only ever appear there). Distances use middle points from Natural Earth, a public-domain map dataset.

Yes. Hint costs no guess and does not uncover a piece. The first hint gives the continent (on Easy it is already printed under the flag, so that one is skipped), the next gives the first letter of the name, and the last shows how many letters it has, such as C _ _ _ _. Once the hints are used up, the button has nothing more to give.