FAQ

Each question starts from reference lists: national registers, gazetteers, atlas indexes and encyclopedia articles. Every place that honestly answers the question is gathered, spellings and old names are merged, and duplicates are dropped.

There are 7 questions a day, the same 7 for everybody, new at 00:00 UTC. Nothing is made up while you play: every list is built and checked before it goes out, and its scores never change once it has.

Rarity means how few people would think of a place, not how odd its name looks. Each answer is scored by how often its name turns up in what people read and write, and the rarity levels are cut from that.

Some lists can't be scored fairly by a number alone. Those get a second pass by hand, and the hand wins. A place you have never heard of is not automatically rare; a place hardly anybody mentions is.

Some questions carry a decoy: a right answer that nearly everyone reaches for when they are trying to be clever. On up to two of the daily's questions its name is shown faintly while you answer. Name it and it counts, but it scores only 15. The idea comes from real mapmakers, who printed made-up places to catch copiers; Agloe, New York was one, and somebody later built a shop there.

Because the legendary answer isn't picked on rarity alone. Among the rarest answers, a hundred names can be equally obscure, and choosing the most obscure of them would be a coin toss.

So the legendary answer is chosen to be satisfying: a name a handful of people will actually reach, and everyone else will read afterwards and remember.

If it was a right answer, I missed it: a source I didn't check, a spelling I didn't fold in, or a reading of the question I didn't think of. That's my mistake, not a ruling.

Send the question and the name to support@fathomgame.io and it goes in, for everybody, from the next day.

Whatever you’d reasonably call one. Taiwan counts. So do Kosovo, Western Sahara, Vatican City, Palestine, the Cook Islands and Niue. If a place has a government, a border and a name people use, it’s in the answer set.

That means the answer sets are usually bigger than the UN’s list of 193. When a prompt is that broad I’ll say “country or territory”, so you know Greenland and Puerto Rico are fair game. When a prompt really does mean the 193 — or the 195 including the two observer states — I’ll say “sovereign”. If a prompt just says “country”, assume the generous reading.

A few specifics, because they come up. England, Scotland and Wales are accepted anywhere the United Kingdom is. Hong Kong and Macau are accepted as territories. The three Congos problem is real, so “DR Congo”, “DRC”, “Congo-Kinshasa” and “Zaire” all land on the Democratic Republic; “Republic of the Congo” and “Congo-Brazzaville” land on the other one; plain “Congo” could be either, so you’ll be asked for the full name rather than have it guessed at.

Old names count wherever the prompt allows it. Burma, Ceylon, Siam, Persia, Zaire, Upper Volta, Rhodesia — if the prompt is about countries that no longer exist, they’re the point. If it’s about countries that do, they’ll still be accepted, because you clearly meant the place.

The Caspian Sea is a lake, so Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan are landlocked, and no question here will ever tell you otherwise.

A bridge or a tunnel counts as a border. Denmark borders Sweden, France borders the United Kingdom, Bahrain borders Saudi Arabia, Malaysia borders Singapore. You can drive it, so it counts. A question that says *land* neighbour or *land* border means the ground itself, so there Denmark’s one neighbour is Germany and the United Kingdom’s is Ireland.

An exclave doesn’t. When a prompt asks what borders Spain, the answer set is France, Portugal, Andorra and Gibraltar — Ceuta and Melilla are Spanish, and they do touch Morocco, but a border prompt means the country you’d draw a line to on the map. Same for Russia and Poland by way of Kaliningrad. Type them anyway if you want: they’re accepted every time, they’re just never the answer the prompt is counting.

I’m not trying to make a political statement with any of this, and I’m not trying to catch you out. If you type something defensible and it doesn’t land, that’s my mistake, not yours.

A fathom is a measure of depth, six feet, and to fathom something is to understand it. Every point you score takes you 10 fathoms deeper, so a perfect day of 700 points goes 7,000 fathoms down, deeper than any sea on Earth.

Not yet. The web page opens from a link and installs nothing, and your browser can add it to your home screen like an app: on an iPhone, tap Share and then Add to Home Screen. If an app would do something this can't, write to support@fathomgame.io and say what.