Border Hop

How to play

You get two countries. Type the countries that lie between them, one at a time. The round ends as soon as the countries you named join the two by land, in any order. Each guess is marked on the globe:

• On a shortest route. This country is on at least one of the shortest ways through.
• Short detour. Going through it costs one or two extra countries.
• Off course. Too far out of the way, or not reachable by land at all.

Run out of guesses, or give up, and one of the shortest routes is drawn on the globe. The climb starts on Easy, with one or two countries between, and every route you finish takes you a step up: Medium, Hard, Expert, Impossible, and last of all one of the longest routes on Earth, seventeen countries between. Lose a route and the climb starts again at Easy. Finish it and you can climb again or stay on Impossible. The daily route is the same for everyone.

Questions people ask

What counts as a border?

A shared land border. Two countries that only face each other across water do not connect, however close they are, so the United Kingdom and France are not neighbours here, and neither are Denmark and Sweden.

Does France border Brazil?

Not in Border Hop. France touches Brazil and Suriname only through French Guiana, an overseas region in South America, and counting it would make Paris two steps from Brasília. Spain does border Morocco: Ceuta and Melilla are part of Spain and sit on the African mainland.

Why can't I name Kosovo or Western Sahara?

The game uses the same 195 countries as our name-all-countries quiz: the 193 UN members plus Vatican City and Palestine. Kosovo and Western Sahara are drawn on the globe but cannot be named, so Morocco does not reach Mauritania and Serbia's way south runs through North Macedonia.

How many guesses do I get?

The number of countries on the shortest route, plus three. One country between gives you four guesses; five between gives you eight. Typos and names you have already used never cost a guess.

What is the longest route in the game?

Lesotho to Papua New Guinea, or Lesotho to Timor-Leste: seventeen countries between, from South Africa up through Africa, the Middle East and Asia to Indonesia. One of them is the last step of the climb.

What makes a route perfect?

Finishing with no wasted guess: every country you named was on one shortest route, and you named no more of them than the route needs.

When does the daily route change?

At midnight on your device. Everyone playing on the same date gets the same two countries, with three to six countries between them.