Seven countries are missing from the world map. Put them back.
Patchwork is a daily map puzzle. Every day seven countries are cut out of the world map: two from Africa, two from Europe, and one each from Asia, the Americas and Oceania. Name a missing country and its exact shape returns in green, islands and all. You have six lives. A country that is already on the map counts as a miss, and the sixth miss ends the day. Restore all seven first to win, and try to do it with as few misses as possible.
The map opens with seven numbered gaps. Say gap 1 is a big, blocky hole on the Atlantic coast of north-west Africa, below Western Sahara and above Senegal. Mali comes to mind first, so you name it. But Mali is already on the map, just to the east, so that is one miss and the first red dot on the miss tracker. Looking again, the gap touches the ocean, and Mali has no coastline. The coastal country between Western Sahara and Senegal is Mauritania, and it snaps back in green.
Gap 5 is a small, landlocked hole in Central Asia, wedged between Kazakhstan to the north, China to the east and Tajikistan to the south. You tap the number to zoom in. The shape is wide and mountainous, with a long, narrow arm reaching west into the Fergana Valley. That is Kyrgyzstan. The rest of the map goes the same way: zoom in, read the neighbours, and name the country only once the coastline and borders agree.
There is no clock. You have six lives, and only wrong guesses cost one: naming a country that is already on the map. The sixth miss ends the puzzle and reveals the countries you had not found. Restore all seven first and you win. Your result counts how many misses it took, from a flawless zero to five.
If you are completely stuck you can reveal the answers yourself, which ends the day as a loss. Your share grid shows each guess as a green or red square in order, so it shows how you got there without naming any countries.
Each region keeps its own list. Africa has 53 eligible countries, Europe 39, Asia 46, the Americas 30 and Oceania 8. Each list is shuffled, and a country does not come back until the rest of its region has been used. The two African and two European gaps are drawn from their lists in the same way. Regions follow the UN’s geographic groupings.
Countries too small to see on a world map are never removed. Monaco, Vatican City, Singapore and most Caribbean and Pacific micro-states would be a single pixel, so there is nothing to find. Every gap that does appear can be zoomed into until its coastline is clear.
The map is drawn from Natural Earth’s public-domain country boundaries, the same geography used across Triviverse Geography. Restoring a country brings back every part of it, so restoring France also restores French Guiana and Réunion. The view is a standard Mercator projection, which keeps shapes recognisable but makes countries far from the equator look larger than they are.
Read each gap by its neighbours, not its shape. A hole on the map is surrounded by countries you can see, and naming them in your head usually leaves only one candidate. Whether a gap touches the sea is the quickest test: if it does, every landlocked country is ruled out, and if it does not, every coastal one is.
Spend misses carefully. With six lives and seven countries to find, a couple of wrong guesses are affordable, but not on every gap. If two countries fit a gap equally well, zoom in before guessing. Coastlines, lakes and islands at full zoom usually settle it. Start with the gaps you are sure of, because every restored country also fixes the borders around the harder gaps next to it.