Farflung · the answer lists

Rulings

How Farflung decides what counts as an answer, and how to dispute a list.

What a pin is

Every pin on land counts for one country: the country the land belongs to.

1. Territories count as the country they belong to. The game treats Guam and Puerto Rico as the United States, Greenland as Denmark, the Falkland Islands as the United Kingdom, Tahiti as France and Hong Kong as China. When you pin one of them, the game shows the country’s name, and the pin scores the same as a pin anywhere else in that country.
2. What is found or done on that land counts for the country. This includes wildlife, shops, borders, coasts and which side of the road people drive on, anywhere in the country or its territories.
   • Penguins live on the Falkland Islands, so the United Kingdom counts for penguins.
   • People drive on the left in Hong Kong and in the US Virgin Islands, so China and the United States count for driving on the left.
   • French Guiana is part of France, so France counts for bordering Brazil.
   • A prompt about something a country does not have works the other way: none of its land can have it. Bermuda has no rivers, but the United Kingdom has many, so a pin on Bermuda misses “no permanent rivers”.
   • Islands too small for the map to draw still count. Claims in Antarctica do not.
3. For names, flags, capitals and official languages, use the country’s own. A territory’s separate name, flag, capital or official language does not count for the country.
   • National flags and variants of the national flag count, including state flags and national ensigns. Regional and personal flags are not national variants.
   • The Falkland Islands are named after a person. That is the islands’ name, not the United Kingdom’s, so the United Kingdom does not count for “named after a person”.
   • A pin on Guam uses the name United States, so it misses “a name with four letters”.
   • Greenland’s official language is Greenlandic, and Denmark’s is Danish. A pin on Greenland counts for Danish, not for Greenlandic.
   • A country’s area excludes its territories. Denmark’s is about 43,000 km², without Greenland’s 2.2 million km². French Guiana is part of France itself, so France’s area includes it.

A few more things the map decides:

• The map has 197 countries: the 193 members of the United Nations, plus the Vatican, Palestine, Kosovo and Taiwan. In four contested places it follows the UN: it treats Somaliland as Somalia, Northern Cyprus as Cyprus, Crimea as Ukraine and the Golan Heights as Syria.
• All of Western Sahara, and the Siachen Glacier, are disputed. The map shows their names and treats them as no country’s. From Expedition #16 a pin can’t be dropped on either: move it onto a country. Antarctica is not on the map.
• Expeditions #1 to #8 keep their prompts, answer lists, scores and the names they showed: a pin on Greenland still shows “Greenland” there. If you play one of them late, that pin counts where Greenland or Denmark is on the list.
• Prompts about names and spellings use each country’s current English short name, as the map labels it: Eswatini, not Swaziland; Czechia; DR Congo. Former names do not normally count; an explicit exception is recorded in the card’s note.

Disputes

Each prompt’s answers at camp include a note explaining its edge cases.

Think something else should count, or that something shouldn’t? At camp, open the prompt’s answers and tap “Should something else count?”. Signed in, you say which country and why, and can add a link that backs it up; our reply comes to Disputes in the game’s menu. For anything that isn’t a dispute, write to [email protected].

• We go through disputes within a week and check them against the rules above.
• If we agree, we fix the answer list. Your game gets the fix the next time it loads.
• When a fix adds an answer, pins already dropped on it count: the miss becomes a find, and your distance for the day, your passport and the day’s results are updated. No ruling lowers a score already recorded.