If you haven’t had enough of the Wordle-inspired games (I still play Redactle every day) you should know about Flagle. No relation to the antifungal medication with a similar name, this is a flag guessing game—with a twist.
As always, we’re using an example from yesterday’s puzzle, so there will be no spoilers here for today’s.
How to play Flagle
When you open the Flagle website, you see a blank grid where a flag will eventually appear. It has six blocks, corresponding to your six guesses—but, like original Wordle, you don’t get any clues until after you guess.
Guesses must be chosen from a list of countries (which at least helps to make sure you won’t misspell them), so begin typing the name of a country and then select the one you want when it pops up. After you enter your guess, one block of the flag will be revealed. If you’re good with flags, you might be able to solve the puzzle on your second guess. (The only way to solve it on your first is luck.) You have six tries before the flag and the answer are fully revealed.
If you’re clueless, ask for directions
My first time playing Flagle, I didn’t recognize the corner of the flag I was given, so I thought I was out of luck. But each guess comes with a clue: how far away it is, and in what direction, from the actual answer.
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For example, in the screenshot above, you can see that my first guess, Afghanistan, was wrong. But I’ve got a big clue in knowing that the solution is a country 7,007 kilometers to the southwest of Afghanistan. (I didn’t notice this, and guessed a different random country; I now also know that the mystery country is 7,146 kilometers northeast of Brazil.) Pro tip: the circumference of the Earth is about 40,000 kilometers, so if you’re off by 10,000, that’s about a quarter of the way around the world.
If you’re good, you’ll be able to puzzle this out from just the mental map in your head. And if you’re a cheater, you can always look at a real map. Once I noticed the distance and headings, I was able to narrow down my search, without cheating(!), to somewhere in the middle-ish of Africa, possibly on the west coast. My last guess before I ran out of tries was Cameroon; the real answer was its neighbor Gabon.
So that gives you two ways you can narrow down the possibilities: flags and geography. And if you enjoy triangulating those distances, you should also try Worldle. It gives you the shape of the country for starters, and then you need to rely only on geographical clues for the rest.
