Terra: Learn and Collect

Most flag quizzes ask one thing: do you recognise this flag? You get good at recognising flags. You still could not point at the country on a map.

Terra asks for three things, and only hands over the patch when all three hold. The flag. Where the country sits in the world. Its capital. Each of them twice, on different days, so it is knowledge and not a lucky guess.

WHAT YOU DO

You start a collecting round. Terra picks the countries and asks each one exactly the skill it is still missing: the flag for one, the position on the map for the next, the capital for the third. When the third one holds, a needle sews the patch into your album.

195 countries. 195 places waiting.

A round mixes deliberately: four countries close to finished, two you have started, two you have never seen. So something is completed almost every round, and something new arrives too.

WHAT TERRA REMEMBERS FOR YOU

What wobbles comes back sooner. What holds, you see less often. You never decide what to revise. Terra schedules it, per country and per skill separately, so you are not asked about a flag you already know just because the capital is shaky.

EIGHT DIRECTIONS, PRACTISED SEPARATELY

Flag to country, country to flag. Map to country, country to map. Country to capital, capital to country. Typing the country name from its flag. And the continent, when you want it easy.

Filter by continent when you want to work through Africa, or leave it open and take the world as it comes.

THE MAP IS A REAL MAP

Satellite imagery with borders drawn over it, and no place names, because otherwise the answer would be written on the screen. For a landlocked country the borders of its neighbours are the only clue, which is exactly the skill.

HARDCORE

For when four answers are too kind: six, with look-alike flags among them every time, and a clock on every question. Six seconds, nine for a map, fifteen to type. Running out counts as wrong. Patches count the same.

ON EVERY SCREEN

iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch and Apple TV, with the same collection. Your progress moves between them through iCloud, and the sides are merged rather than overwritten, so playing on one never costs you a patch on another.

On iPhone Duo Terra fills both displays, turns when opened, and held like a book puts the question on one page and the answers on the other.

ON THE WRIST

Five questions, flags and capitals, short enough to finish while you wait for something else. A complication on the watch face says whether today's round is still open.

The watch does not ask you to place a country on a map, and that is on purpose: picking one off a world map at that size tests your finger, not your knowledge. So a round on the wrist can finish a patch whose position you learned somewhere with more room, and can never produce one on its own. It adds to the album instead of going around it.

WIDGETS

The flag of the day, kept nameless until you have collected that country. The album filling up. Your streak, with a nudge when today is still open.

DUEL A FRIEND

Or a tournament of up to eight. Random questions, the same ones for everyone, and everybody answers in their own time: nobody has to be online at the same minute. You can also challenge anyone by code or link, through any messenger. Invite now, play later, find every duel in one list, and hear when the other side has played. Afterwards you go through the round question by question and see what each of you got right. Kept apart from your album on purpose, because those questions were not chosen for you.

GAME CENTER

Leaderboards for patches, streak and best round. Achievements for every continent completed, and one for all 195. And a friends list, showing what the people you know have collected.

NO ACCOUNT, NO TRACKING

Terra has no sign-up, no advertising and no analytics. The dataset and all 195 flags are inside the app.