Guess the Capital City

Guess the Capital names a country and offers four cities. It is the most learnable of our six games: the material is finite, the facts do not change often, and a couple of minutes a day for a month will genuinely move you from guessing to knowing.

Almost every mistake comes from one shortcut, which is assuming a country's biggest or most famous city must be its capital. Usually that is right. The exceptions are precisely what a quiz is built from.

How to play

The Daily Challenge is five countries, the same five for every player worldwide, resetting at local midnight. Free Play is unlimited and never affects your streak, and the archive keeps the last 30 days playable. Every answer reveals the correct capital immediately.

What is in the deck

250 countries and territories, each appearing exactly once, covering every continent along with island states and dependent territories. The spread means the game is not simply a test of European geography: a day's five questions can as easily be Oceania, West Africa and the Caribbean.

That uniqueness is not a given. An audit in 2026 found that 62 entries in an earlier version of this dataset were duplicates, making the deck materially smaller than its stated size. All 62 were replaced with genuine, distinct countries and territories, and two capitals recorded incorrectly, for Bolivia and Sri Lanka, were fixed at the same time. Both changes are listed in our release notes.

Which capital we treat as correct

We use the capital as officially designated by the country itself, cross checked against United Nations member state listings and national government sources. Where a country designates more than one, the question says so rather than forcing a choice. Where a capital is in the middle of relocating, we use the city currently functioning as the seat of government and revisit it as the situation changes.

Six traps worth knowing

• The famous city decoy. Sydney, Istanbul, Rio de Janeiro, Lagos, Casablanca, Almaty, Auckland and Zurich are all large, famous and not capitals.
• The purpose built capital. Canberra, Brasilia, Abuja, Islamabad, Belmopan, Naypyidaw and Washington were all built or chosen specifically to be capitals. An unfamiliar, slightly artificial sounding name is often the answer.
• The plausible neighbour. Wrong options are frequently the real capitals of nearby countries, so familiarity is not evidence of belonging.
• Out of date names. Rangoon, Nur-Sultan, Bombay and Peking all still circulate in older reference material.
• Two right answers. With South Africa, Bolivia, Benin, Eswatini and the Netherlands, decide whether the question wants the constitutional capital or the seat of government.
• Learn by region. Memory stores places spatially, so working through one continent at a time makes neighbouring countries reinforce each other.

Our guide, World Capitals Everyone Gets Wrong, has the full list of traps, the countries that moved their capital and when, and five techniques that actually make them stick.

Practice one continent at a time

Learning capitals works far better by region than alphabetically, because a run of neighbouring countries cues itself. Each set below is a ten question round drawn from the same 250 entries, with a written piece on the capitals in that region that catch people out. Topic sets are practice only and never touch your streak.

Frequently asked questions

How many countries are in the game?

250 countries and territories, each appearing once. An audit in 2026 found 62 duplicated entries in an earlier version of this dataset and replaced every one of them with a genuine, distinct country or territory.

Which capital counts as the correct answer?

The capital as officially designated by the country itself, cross checked against United Nations member state listings. Where a country designates more than one capital, the question says so.

What about countries with several capitals?

South Africa has three, and Bolivia, the Netherlands, Benin, Chile and Eswatini all separate their constitutional capital from their seat of government. We flag these rather than pretending there is one tidy answer.

Are territories included?

Yes, and they are labelled as such. Places that are not sovereign states have capitals too, and excluding them would shrink the deck considerably.

Is Guess the Capital free?

Yes. No account, no login, and your statistics stay on your own device.

Play next: Guess the Year and Who Said It · All guides · How we verify questions · All six games