Flags of the World

The world's 197 sovereign flags fall into roughly six visual families. Tricolor verticals (France, Italy, Mexico, Ireland, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Romania, Chad, Belgium) descend from the French revolutionary tricolor. Tricolor horizontals (Germany, Russia, Netherlands, Egypt, Iraq, Sierra Leone, Hungary, Lithuania) trace to the Dutch revolt of the 1570s and the Russian merchant flag. Pan-African flags carry red, gold, green, sometimes black — descended from Ghana 1957 and Ethiopia before it. Pan-Arab flags use red, white, black, green — derived from the Arab Revolt of 1916. Pan-Slavic flags use red, white, blue. The Nordic cross runs across Scandinavia (Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland), and the Southern Cross + Union Jack motif clusters in Oceania (Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Tuvalu). This hub ships in two modes: multiple choice (see flag, pick from four country names) and type-in (see flag, type the country). 194 flags total — Israel's flag PNG is missing from the asset bucket at this writing and Israel is temporarily excluded; the remaining 195 sovereign UN-member states (minus Taiwan + Kosovo per JetPunk convention) are all covered. Players who study the visual families can identify ~80% of world flags correctly. The hardest 20% tend to be the post-Soviet states (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan — all light blue with distinctive emblems but similar at a glance) and the Central American + Caribbean cluster (Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador all carry blue-white-blue horizontals with their coat of arms in the center).