Name the countries between two others, one land border at a time.
Overland is a daily route-finding puzzle. You are given a start country and a destination, and you have to name the countries that link them over land. Guess in any order. Each country you name appears on the map, coloured by how close it is to a shortest route. When the countries you have named form an unbroken land chain from start to destination, you have arrived. You get the shortest route’s length plus four guesses, and three hints if you get stuck.
Take a short one first: France to Poland. The shortest route has a single country in between, Germany, so you get five guesses. Name Germany and it goes green, the chain France–Germany–Poland is complete and you have arrived in one guess, a perfect score. Suppose instead you had opened with the Czech Republic. It goes yellow, one country off a shortest route, because France–Germany–Czech Republic–Poland is one step longer than it needs to be. Austria would come back orange. Spain would be orange too, since getting there and back costs two extra countries.
A longer daily might ask for Portugal to Greece, where the shortest route has seven countries in between: Spain, France, Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro and Albania. That gives eleven guesses. The route along the Adriatic is not the only one of that length, and any unbroken chain counts. A player who goes through Switzerland and Austria instead, or detours into Serbia, still arrives. They just use more of their guesses.
Only land borders count, taken from Natural Earth’s country boundaries. Countries that face each other across a strait or a sea are not neighbours, however close they are. The United Kingdom and France do not border each other in Overland, despite the Channel Tunnel. Spain and Morocco do, at Ceuta and Melilla. Overseas territories are left out, so France does not border Brazil through French Guiana. Exclaves do count, so Russia borders Poland and Lithuania through Kaliningrad.
Disputed areas follow Natural Earth’s de facto boundaries, so Kosovo and Western Sahara are countries you can route through. Island countries with no land border at all, such as Japan, Iceland or New Zealand, are never a start or a destination. There are 4,348 possible start-and-destination pairs, and every daily is checked to have a route.
Three hints are available, each once per puzzle. “Next outline” draws the outline of the next country you need on the map, without naming it. “All borders” draws every country’s outline, which helps when you are unsure what lies between two places. “Initials” shows the first letter of each country on a shortest route.
Hints do not cost guesses, but they are counted in your shared result, so a friend can see whether you found the route on your own.
Before guessing, trace the route in your head from both ends. Name the country next to the start, then the country next to the destination, and meet in the middle. A colour tells you more than whether you were right. Yellow means the country is close to a good route, so its neighbours are worth a look. Red often means you have crossed water in your head.
Watch for the borders people forget. Small countries in the middle of a route, like Liechtenstein, Andorra and Luxembourg, or the Balkan states, are often the difference between a short route and a long one. Big countries can be shortcuts: the Democratic Republic of the Congo borders nine countries, and Russia fourteen.
Every win is scored against the shortest route. Arriving using exactly as many guesses as the shortest route has countries is a perfect run, shown with a sparkle in your shared result. Each extra guess counts as one over, from +1 up to +4, the most the guess limit allows. The chart on your result card shows how often you have finished at each of those marks, so over a few weeks it shows whether your routes are getting tighter.
The share text shows one coloured square per guess, in the order you made them, so a friend can see whether you went straight down the route or wandered off it first, without learning which countries you named. It also shows how many hints you used. If you run out of guesses, the result card shows a shortest route in full, so you can see which link you were missing.