Answer the ones you know instantly and don't agonise over the rest — at three seconds a mistake, a fast guess costs less than a slow think.
Capital Quiz — a free capital cities game you can play in your browser
A country appears with four candidate capitals. Pick the right one. You have sixty seconds, every correct answer is a point, and every wrong one burns three seconds off the clock — so the game punishes hesitation and bad guesses in the same currency.
What makes it worth replaying is that it adapts. The first questions come from the countries almost everyone knows; each point you score widens the pool toward the ones almost nobody does. A beginner is asked about France and Japan. Someone twenty points in is being asked about Suriname and Kyrgyzstan. Free, no download, and your best five runs are saved on your device.
How to play
- Read the country and tap the capital city from the four options.
- On a keyboard, press 1, 2, 3 or 4 to answer.
- Correct is +1 point. Wrong costs 3 seconds of your minute.
- The run ends when the clock hits zero. Your score is the points you banked.
The largest-city trap, and why capitals are harder than they look
Most wrong answers in this game are not ignorance. They are a reasonable rule of thumb misfiring: people name the country's biggest or most famous city. It works often enough to feel safe — London, Paris, Tokyo, Moscow — and then it quietly fails on a long list of countries where the seat of government was deliberately put somewhere else.
The classic misses are Turkey (Ankara, not Istanbul), Australia (Canberra, not Sydney), Brazil (Brasília, not Rio de Janeiro), Canada (Ottawa, not Toronto), Switzerland (Bern, not Zurich), the United States (Washington, D.C., not New York), New Zealand (Wellington, not Auckland), Nigeria (Abuja, not Lagos), Morocco (Rabat, not Casablanca) and Myanmar (Naypyidaw, not Yangon).
There's a pattern behind the list. Several of those capitals are purpose-built compromises — cities placed to settle a rivalry between larger ones, or to pull government toward the interior of a country. Canberra exists because Sydney and Melbourne both wanted it. Brasília was built inland in the 1950s to draw development away from the coast. Abuja replaced Lagos in 1991 for a more central, more neutral location. Astana, Naypyidaw and Egypt's new administrative capital are recent entries in the same tradition.
The practical lesson for this quiz: when a country's most famous city is one of the four options, treat that as a warning rather than a hint. Question-setters and reality both like the other one.
More games
The rest of the geography set: Flag Quiz covers all 193 flags, Higher or Lower pits two countries' populations against each other, Bigger Country does the same for land area, and Odd One Out asks which country doesn't belong. Or try a different kind of recall in Verbal Memory, or browse all games.