Paint by Nation

Paint by Nation is a free flag quiz where you paint the answer instead of picking it. The card names a country, its flag appears as a blank pencil outline, and you colour it in from memory: load a paint from the pots, tap the part of the flag it belongs to, and watch the paint flood across it. When the flag looks right, press Submit and it is marked part by part. It is a paint the flag game, a flag coloring game and a flags of the world quiz in one, it covers the flags of all 195 countries (the 193 members of the United Nations plus Vatican City and Palestine), and it plays in your browser with nothing to download. If you like to guess the flag by color, this is that game turned around: we name the country, and you supply every colour of its flag.

Each flag is drawn on its real proportions with its real layout, from Nordic crosses and the stars of China to the crescent of Turkey, the sun of Kiribati and the Union Jack in the canton of Australia, and in its own true shades: Japan's crimson is not Canada's red, and Luxembourg's sky blue is not the darker blue of the Netherlands. Flags with a coat of arms, a seal or an emblem show it already in full colour, so you only paint the fields, stripes and shapes around it: Spain's arms, Mexico's eagle on its cactus, Cambodia's Angkor Wat and Brazil's starry globe are there to help you place the colours.

There are two ways to play on this page. Easy gives you only the flag's own colours, so the question is where each one goes: is Ireland green, white and orange from the flagpole out, or is that Ivory Coast? Hard gives you eight paints, the flag's colours among look-alike shades, so you also have to know which colours it has: red or maroon for Qatar, blue or light blue for Botswana, yellow or orange for Armenia. Both have no clock and three lives: every flag you submit with a mistake costs a life, and the run ends with the third, or when you have painted every flag in the world. A run starts with famous flags like Japan, France, Germany and the United Kingdom and works its way to the ones only real flag fans can paint without a slip, from Kiribati to Eswatini.

Scoring is simple. Every part painted in its true colour is worth 100 points. A perfect flag adds a bonus of 100 points, 200 for two perfect flags in a row, and so on up to 500 for five or more, shown as the streak stars at the top of the screen. Mistakes never take points away, but they cost a life and reset the streak. Every run deals the flags in the same order of difficulty, so every run is equally fair: play as often as you like and climb the Easy and Hard leaderboards of our competitive games, where top scores are verified by replaying the run. A 90-second version with the Hard paints plays in Swipe mode.

Paint by Nation plays the same on a phone, a tablet or a computer. On a touch screen, tap a paint pot, tap the flag, then tap Submit; with a mouse, click them. On a keyboard the keys 1 to 8 load the paints in the order of the pots and Enter submits the flag. Each pot is labelled with its colour name, so the game never relies on colour alone. It is one of our mobile games and PC games, and one of our flag games.

Paint by Nation belongs to our quiz games and geography games. If you enjoy testing your memory, try the brain games, or find more one-minute challenges among the quick games.