About

Draw the Flag is a small daily game about the gap between recognising something and actually knowing it. Most people can pick their own flag out of a line-up instantly and then discover, pencil in hand, that they are not sure which side the stripe goes on.

How the flags are made

Every reference flag in this game is drawn by the game itself from a geometric description — stripes, crosses, discs, stars and their proportions — rather than loaded as an image. That keeps the game fast, lets it render crisply at any size, and means no third-party artwork is used anywhere on the site.

Accuracy

Flags with intricate emblems are rendered as their broad shapes and are marked as such on their pages; scoring never depends on reproducing fine detail. If you spot a flag that looks wrong, that is a bug worth fixing — flags are national symbols and getting them right matters.

Why the scoring works the way it does

An early version scored on pixel-for-pixel similarity. It turned out to reward neat handwriting rather than knowledge: people who knew a flag perfectly but drew it shakily scored below people who drew a wrong flag tidily. The current system compares coarse regions of colour and weights the coloured areas above the white ones, which measures the thing the game is actually about — do you know where the colours go.

Accuracy and corrections

Flags with intricate emblems are rendered as their broad shapes and are marked as such on their pages; scoring never depends on reproducing fine detail. If you spot a flag that looks wrong, that is a bug worth fixing — flags are national symbols and getting them right matters more than getting them shipped.

Privacy

There is no account and no server-side profile. Your streak and scores live in your browser. See the privacy page.