One tile of the flag to start; every wrong guess uncovers more.
Unfurl is a daily flag puzzle. The day’s flag is hidden under six tiles with just one uncovered, and you have six guesses to name the country. Every wrong guess lifts another tile and tells you how far your guess is from the answer, which way to head and how close you are as a percentage. The flag and the map close in together. Everyone gets the same flag each day, and Unlimited mode serves random flags.
The one open tile shows a corner of bright green, cut off by a diagonal edge. Green on its own could be half the flags in Africa or the Islamic world, so you guess Nigeria, whose flag is green and white. Wrong. The clue reads 3,446 km away, head south-east, 82% close. A second tile lifts and shows a broad black band edged in yellow, running diagonally across the flag.
Black, yellow and green together suggest Jamaica, but Jamaica’s stripes form an X, and Jamaica is on the far side of the Atlantic. The clue puts the answer in Africa, south-east of Nigeria. A single diagonal band in black and yellow, with green above it, in East Africa can only be Tanzania. You name it with your second guess, and the whole flag unfurls, including the blue triangle in the bottom-right corner. A good flag round mixes recognition with map reasoning, and neither alone gets you there as fast.
The flag sits under a grid of six tiles, two rows of three. One tile is open at the start, and every wrong guess opens one more in a fixed order, so by your sixth and final guess you can see five sixths of the flag. Win or lose, the full flag is revealed at the end.
Each wrong guess is scored exactly as it is in Borderline: the great-circle distance between the centres of the two countries, the compass direction from your guess towards the answer, and a closeness percentage that runs from 0% at the opposite side of the planet to 100% at the answer.
Learn the families of flags rather than flags one by one. The pan-African colours of red, gold and green run through Ghana, Senegal, Mali, Cameroon, Ethiopia and many more. The pan-Arab red, white, black and green appear across the Middle East and North Africa. The Nordic cross belongs to Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland. Pan-Slavic red, white and blue run through Russia, Serbia, Slovakia and Slovenia. One tile is often enough to place a flag in its family, and the distance clue does the rest.
Use proportions as well. Most flags are 2:3, but Switzerland and Vatican City are square, Nepal’s is a double pennant, and Qatar’s is unusually long at 11:28. When a tile shows a flag running off the edge sooner than you expect, that is a clue in itself.
Flags are drawn at their official proportions from public-domain artwork on Wikimedia Commons, so emblems, coats of arms and stars are shown in full detail when the last tile lifts. There are 197 flags in the daily pool. A flag that is identical to another answer’s is never used as the answer, because that would leave the round to a coin toss. New Caledonia, which flies the French tricolour, is the one excluded for that reason.
The daily works through the whole pool in a shuffled order before any flag repeats. Unlimited mode picks a random flag each round and never affects your daily streak.
The two kinds of clue work best side by side. The flag narrows the answer to a family of similar flags, and the distance clue picks one country from that family. A flag that is red over white could be Indonesia or Monaco, which are almost identical apart from their proportions. A clue that points thousands of kilometres east towards Southeast Asia, rather than to the Mediterranean, settles it at once.
So it can be worth spending an early guess on a country you know is wrong, if it sits somewhere that will give a clear direction. A central guess like Egypt or Kazakhstan gives an arrow that means something wherever the answer is. A guess on the edge of the map, like New Zealand, mostly tells you that the answer is somewhere else.