Name every capital in the world, or one continent at a time, before the clock runs out. Each one spins the globe there and fills it in green.
Name the capital of every country, for the whole world or one continent. Each right answer spins the globe to the city and fills its country in green, so you learn where each capital sits as well as its name. A click-the-map mode turns it around: you're given the capital and click its country. If you've done the capitals quiz on Sporcle or JetPunk, it's the same format, played on a 3D globe. (Geographys isn't affiliated with Sporcle or JetPunk.)
How it works
1Type capitals in any order. Each one is credited the moment it's spelled right.
2Common alternate names and spellings work too.
3Name as many as you can before the clock runs out. Hint shows the first letter of one you're missing, but costs time.
Tips
The capital isn't always the biggest city. Canberra, Ottawa, Brasília, Abuja, Ankara and Washington catch out players who guess the famous city instead.
Several countries share a name with their capital: Mexico City, Guatemala City, Panama City, Kuwait City, Singapore, Djibouti, San Marino and Luxembourg among them.
Work through the globe as it fills in. The countries still grey are the capitals you're missing.
Some countries have more than one capital, or a well-known de facto one. Those are accepted alongside the official capital.
Questions
How long do I get?
About 5.5 seconds a capital, with at least six minutes: roughly 18 minutes for the whole world. Capitals take longer to recall than country names, so the clock is a little more generous.
Do I need accents?
No. Bogotá, Brasília and Asunción are accepted without accents, and common alternate spellings work too.
What's the click-the-map mode?
The reverse: you're given a capital and click the country it belongs to on the globe.
Are territories included?
Only in the With territories rounds, free with an account, which add the capitals of 46 inhabited territories, from Nuuk to Papeete. Hong Kong and Macau count as their own capitals. A territory counts if it's inhabited and has its own ISO country code, so French Guiana is in but the Canary Islands aren't.
Capitals that moved, and countries with more than one
A capital is usually the seat of government, but not always the city a constitution names. Bolivia and South Africa each divide the job between more than one city, with the government, parliament and courts in different places, so a quiz has to settle on one answer and accept the others.
Capitals also move. Nigeria moved its government out of Lagos in 1991, Kazakhstan out of Almaty in 1997, and Myanmar out of Yangon in 2005 and 2006, and in all three the old capital is still the country's biggest city. The Capitals section of Learn tells the story behind many of them.