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The Asia Quiz

The largest continent, from the Levant to the Pacific rim. This pack draws from 239 real places, and the quiz is not multiple choice: you get an unlabelled 3D globe, the name of a place, and 10 seconds to pin where it is. Points scale with how close you land and how fast you commit, so a near miss beats a wild stab and knowing beats guessing.

Asia is not a region, it is a continent pretending to be one

Asia is the largest landmass on Earth, and this pack draws from all of it: the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, the Indian subcontinent, Southeast Asia, China, Japan, Korea, the Central Asian republics, Siberia, and the Caucasus. The scale is the difficulty. The distance from Istanbul to Tokyo is over nine thousand kilometres, wider than the Atlantic, and a confident "Asian city" guess that lands on the wrong end of that line costs you everything. The single most valuable habit in this pack is asking which Asia a clue means before you touch the globe, because the continent is at least five distinct maps bolted together.

The biggest leak for most players is the interior. The coastal capitals, Tokyo, Seoul, Singapore, are drilled into the mental map, but the Central Asian republics and the Siberian cities are where confident guesses turn into thousand-kilometre misses. Samarkand is not Dubai; Yakutsk is not Vladivostok. Treat the interior as its own map and the pack stops being a lottery.

Five belts that hold the continent together

The East Asian rim. Tokyo, Beijing, Seoul, Shanghai and Hong Kong cluster on the Pacific coast between roughly 30 and 40 degrees north, with Osaka, Kyoto, Taipei and Busan nearby. If a clue names a Chinese, Japanese or Korean city, the pin belongs on the western Pacific rim, not in the continental interior. The latitude band is tight, so once you know the country the longitude settles itself.

The Indian subcontinent. Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai, Bengaluru and Karachi all sit on or near the Indian peninsula, which points south toward the equator. The capitals, Islamabad, Dhaka, Kathmandu and Colombo, ring the northern and southern edges. The Himalayas form the northern wall, so anything "Indian" that is not in the mountains belongs south of the range and on the peninsula.

The Silk Road corridor. Samarkand, Bukhara, Khiva and Tashkent sit in Uzbekistan and the surrounding Central Asian republics, between the Caspian Sea and the Tien Shan. They share a latitude around 40 degrees north and a dry, landlocked setting. The Registan in Samarkand and the ancient ruins of Persepolis in Iran bookend this belt, which runs west into the Caucasus: Tbilisi, Yerevan and Baku.

The Arabian block. Riyadh, Jeddah, Mecca, Baghdad, Tehran and Isfahan sit on the Arabian Peninsula and its northern shoulder. The latitude runs from about 24 to 35 degrees north, and the whole block is arid. The Kaaba in Mecca is the southern anchor; the Persian Gulf states, Doha, Muscat, Manama, line the eastern shore. If a clue is Middle Eastern, the pin belongs on the dry side of the continent, not on a coast you remember from the East Asian rim.

The Siberian north. Yakutsk, Norilsk, Oymyakon, Verkhoyansk and Magadan are where even good players run out of map. They sit above 60 degrees north, far from the familiar Asian cities, and they punish anyone who pictures Asia as tropical. Anadyr sits on the Pacific near the Bering Strait; Tiksi and Pevek sit on the Arctic coast. The useful habit is asking whether a Russian city is in Asia at all, because the Urals divide the country and Yekaterinburg sits right on the line.

What makes an Asian run hard

The pack's 239 places mix modern megacities with ancient sites and remote outposts, and the confusables are punishing. Naypyidaw is not Yangon, the capital Myanmar built from nothing and the city it replaced. New Delhi is not Old Delhi. Astana in Kazakhstan has been renamed and renamed again, and the pack keeps the current name. Southeast Asia has its own density trap: Hanoi and Hồ Chí Minh City are both Vietnamese but over a thousand kilometres apart, and Phnom Penh, Vientiane and Bangkok all sit in a cluster that rewards knowing the Mekong line. For why capitals move and how to place the planned ones, The Capitals Nobody Guesses covers Naypyidaw and Astana in detail. For the systematic way to build the map this pack rewards, the twelve-anchor method sets the fixed points the rest of the continent hangs from.

How a run works

A run is 10 places sampled fresh from the pack each time, timed, and scored server-side onto the pack's own leaderboard. Your best run stands as your entry, and you can grind it down (or up) as long as you like. Free accounts get one ranked run a day; premium is unlimited.

Places you might be asked to pin

  • Abu Dhabi · United Arab Emirates
  • Ahmedabad · India
  • Ajanta · India
  • Aleppo · Syria
  • Almaty · Kazakhstan
  • Amman · Jordan
  • Anadyr · Siberia, Russia
  • Angkor Wat · Cambodia
  • Ankara · Türkiye
  • Antalya · Türkiye

…and 229 more across the pack.

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