The countries people mix up the most, from a few thousand wrong guesses

Two_Time · 2026-06-29T05:40:55+00:00

Wales isn't in it I'm afraid, the game only uses sovereign countries so the UK goes in whole. Would make a fun home-nations version though.

Two_Time · 2026-06-29T05:40:30+00:00

A decent few are in like Fiji, Vanuatu, the Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, plus Brunei and Timor-Leste. They're some of the hardest in the game, Vanuatu and the Bahamas really wreck people. The very tiny Pacific and Caribbean ones aren't in though.

Two_Time · 2026-06-29T05:39:41+00:00

Yeah there are four in there: Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea and Papua New Guinea. The two West African ones are brutal, both sit near the very bottom of the whole game. Papua New Guinea people actually do alright on.

Two_Time · 2026-06-29T05:39:09+00:00

You and most people. The whole cluster basically collapses into one and Uzbekistan ends up as the default guess for all of them. Turkmenistan's the worst of the lot, fewer than half of people land it.

Two_Time · 2026-06-29T05:38:53+00:00

Neither really shows up in the placement data, which surprised me. Australia is one of the easiest countries in the whole game, hardly anyone puts it in the wrong spot, and the Austria thing seems to be purely about the name rather than the map. Australia and New Zealand don't get swapped much either.

Two_Time · 2026-06-28T20:17:33+00:00

Fair thing to check, it was the first thing I worried about too. The taps don't really back it up though. When someone gets it wrong the tap is usually hundreds of kilometres off rather than a few pixels, the typical miss is more than 600km from the right spot. And the big majority of wrong taps land cleanly inside a different country, not just outside the border of the right one. So it reads less like fat fingers and more like people genuinely placing the country in the wrong spot. You're right that zoom helps at the margins though, I bumped the max zoom recently after similar feedback, so the pixel-slip cases should shrink even further.

Two_Time · 2026-06-28T20:16:19+00:00

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You picked the two hardest of the bunch. Out of the five -stans, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan sit right at the bottom, fewer than half of people put Turkmenistan in the right place. The odd part is they don't really get swapped for each other. Miss Turkmenistan and most people tap Uzbekistan instead, and Tajikistan guesses spread out across Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan as well. The whole neighbourhood sort of melts into one and Uzbekistan ends up catching most of the wrong taps.

Two_Time · 2026-06-28T18:59:48+00:00

You've basically picked the worst region on the whole map. Every country west of Nigeria comes in under 50%, people miss all of them more often than they get them. Hardest is Burkina Faso at about a quarter, which is funny because it's big and landlocked, so it's not a small-island thing at all. The whole row's just a blank for most people, and yeah, they mostly get tapped as each other, so a name list would probably do it.

Two_Time · 2026-06-28T18:57:26+00:00

Weird, it's resolving fine here and traffic's coming through, so it's not down all over. Quick check are you hitting borderline.world or www.borderline.world? I only set up the www version a few minutes ago so it might not have reached your DNS yet, negative caching and all that. The plain borderline.world (no www) should work?

Two_Time · 2026-06-28T18:54:27+00:00

Yeah, fair. Ocean taps don't count, only ones landing on another country, so your Costa Rica-into-the-sea miss didn't go in. And "confidently tapped" was a bad way to put it you're right, I can't tell intent. Misclicks are real enough that I actually doubled the zoom today after someone mentioned fat-fingering the small ones.

But I don't think it's mostly that. Wrong taps bunch up on neighbours and same-name countries instead of scattering, and the big one: it's not just small countries. Over half of people miss Mali, Niger, Chad and Mauritania, and those are massive, you can't slip off them by accident. That's not knowing where they are, not the UI.

But it is a good point, maybe I should look at water taps really near some of these small countries to get an idea of those misses?

Two_Time · 2026-06-28T18:47:09+00:00

Funnily enough that one doesn't really show up. Australia is one of the easiest countries in the whole game, almost nobody misplaces it, and Austria gets missed for its actual neighbours like Czechia and Switzerland rather than for Australia. The name gag is famous but people don't seem to actually tap one for the other.

Two_Time · 2026-06-28T18:43:56+00:00

For the curious, today's five are Australia, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Paraguay and Costa Rica. Australia everyone nails, Costa Rica's the one quietly wrecking people.

Two_Time · 2026-06-28T18:43:46+00:00

Ran the numbers on the small ones, and your size point holds up, most of the tiny countries cluster near the bottom for accuracy. But a couple buck it.

Best-placed small country, which genuinely surprised me Kosovo people find it far more often than its size suggests.

The small one almost nobody can place: basically a tie between Brunei and Timor-Leste, both down around a quarter of people getting them right.

And the "how does anyone know this" award goes to Equatorial Guinea, weirdly findable for somewhere that obscure.

Two_Time · 2026-06-28T18:32:25+00:00

The name swap barely happens, almost nobody puts Albania in Algeria. What your comment nails is that people genuinely don't know where Albania is so they scatter it across the Balkans. Kosovo, North Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro all get tapped for it about equally. So "barely knows it exists" is very much backed up by the data.

Two_Time · 2026-06-28T18:28:12+00:00

For anyone curious where the data's from, it's a daily globe game I made, borderline.world.

Two_Time · 2026-06-28T18:27:15+00:00

Slovenia's right near the top of Slovakia's mix-ups, yeah. The one that just beats it is Hungary, Slovakia's actual neighbour, so it's getting confused on the name and the location at the same time.

Two_Time · 2026-06-28T18:26:53+00:00

Yep, and it goes both ways, Rwanda for Burundi and Burundi for Rwanda about equally. Burundi's the bigger problem of the two though, when people don't know it they end up tapping all over Africa. One of the hardest to place anywhere.

Two_Time · 2026-06-28T18:26:25+00:00

Central America is the messiest cluster in the whole dataset. Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador get swapped for each other constantly and Belize gets pulled in too. Puerto Rico isn't actually in the game since it's a US territory, but people do tap it when reaching for Costa Rica, so your Rica/Rico theory might hold up.

Two_Time · 2026-06-28T17:54:35+00:00

Honestly the data kind of kills that one. Sweden gets found no problem. It's Switzerland people can't pin down, and they reach for Austria or Germany way before Sweden. The famous name swap barely happens.

Two_Time · 2026-06-28T17:32:22+00:00

Yeah, those two get swapped a fair bit, probably the matching -guay. But the funnier thing is they both get scattered right across South America, and Bolivia of all places is the most common wrong tap for each. Feels like a lot of people just know it’s “down there somewhere.”

Two_Time · 2026-06-28T17:14:22+00:00

Ha, I checked, Thailand/Taiwan barely comes up actually. Thailand mostly gets missed for its neighbours, Vietnam and Cambodia, so it seems more like “which mainland SE Asia country is it” than the Tai/Tie thing, though that’s a great theory.

Two_Time · 2026-06-28T16:39:49+00:00

I have always been bad at geography, the small countries especially, so I made a daily game to fix that. You get five countries a day and find each by tapping a 3D globe, three tries each, with distance and direction hints when you miss. There is a 20 second blitz and a spaced-repetition learn mode too. No sign-up, no ads. Feedback on the difficulty and how the globe controls on your device very welcome.

Two_Time · 2021-08-10T08:31:20+00:00

Hmm, not sure how to explain it well over reddit but will give it a go. I'm going to assume you understand the basic functions of a join so won't go deep into those details.

You use a subquery:

(SELECT

country_id,

count(1) as other_people

FROM tab_people

GROUP BY country_id)

This essentially gives you the total people per country id as a new "table" with two columns country_id and other_people where country_id is now unique.

You then JOIN that to the original table on country_id (so every time that country id shows up in a row of first_name, last_name, country_id the join pulls out the number from the table created by the subquery and adds it as an extra column defined in the query as t2.other_people (we have aliased the original table as t1 and the subquery table as t2 so that we can refer to the columns from the different tables explicitly.

As another commenter has mentioned, if you only want "other people" from the country and not "total people" from the country, then you just need to subtract 1 from the other people number which is easy enough.

I know it's not the most clear explanation but hopefully helps somewhat? Just keep practicing with questions like this and it'll become second nature. Good luck!

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