Games Like Farflung

Farflung folds a few ideas into one short round. The table splits them apart, names the game here that shares each one and says what is different about it.

Uncommet is built on the same idea as Farflung: every right answer counts, and the rarer it is, the further it takes you. Each day brings eight prompts, the same for every player, and you type one real answer to each before a 25-second clock runs out. Many are about places, such as a country in Africa, a city in a given country, a river or an island; the rest range across film, music, science, food and sport. The answer most people would give scores 10 points and one almost nobody thinks of scores 100, judged by how often each answer is looked up on Wikipedia and how many languages have an article on it. Your points push a rocket away from Earth, past the Moon and Mars toward Pluto, so a day of rare answers really does travel further. You fly one mission a day, and nothing is suggested while you type.

If the map is what you enjoy, play GeoDrop. Each day names eight places, from Paris to Ulaanbaatar, and you pin each one on a world map with no labels, only coastlines, lakes and faint borders. Every pin scores up to 1,000 points by its distance from the real spot, the full 1,000 within 25 km, and after each one you see where everyone else pinned it and whether you beat the crowd's average pin. Farflung asks which countries fit a prompt; GeoDrop asks exactly where one place is, so it trains the other half of reading a map.

Farflung's rare answers come easier the more of the world you can picture. Paint by Nation names a country and has you paint its flag from memory, as many as you can in two minutes, the same flags for everyone each day. Capital Sprint is a daily capitals quiz, twelve questions with four choices each, three of which flip round and name a capital for you to place. Both are one run a day, new at midnight New York time, so they sit well beside the day's prompts. More are on the geography games and flag games pages.

Common Ground also uses prompts with many right answers, such as something yellow or a famous Steve: ten a day, twenty seconds each. Here the obvious answer wins, because you score by giving the same answer most people gave. If Farflung has trained you to skip the first country that comes to mind, it is a fun test of whether you can still think like everyone else.

Pick Uncommet if the rare-answer scoring keeps you coming back, GeoDrop if you love the map itself, Paint by Nation or Capital Sprint to sharpen your knowledge of countries, and Common Ground for a lighter round about other people. All five are daily and the same for everyone. For more daily rounds in the same spirit, see the games like Krillion and today's Daily Games.