Guess the Capital
A country on screen and four cities under it, all four from the same region. A South American capital sitting among three Asian ones answers itself, so the decoys are always neighbours.
The rule that makes this harder than it looks: official capitals only. Where a country separates the constitutional capital from the city everybody has heard of, the constitutional one is the answer.
Pick a country's capital city.
Play Guess the CapitalThe cities people get wrong
The classic error is the largest city standing in for the seat of government: Rio for Brasília, Istanbul for Ankara, Lagos for Abuja, Yangon for Naypyidaw, Abidjan for Yamoussoukro, Sydney for Canberra, Toronto for Ottawa. Every one of those countries is in the deck. The useful thing is that the four buttons are always genuine capitals of countries in the same region, so if the city you were about to pick is not among them, it is usually because it is not a capital at all.
The second family is the purpose-built capital, and this deck has a lot of them. Brasília, Canberra, Abuja, Astana, Naypyidaw, Yamoussoukro and Islamabad were all built or promoted to be capitals, generally to move the seat of government away from a coastal commercial city. Recognising that pattern is worth more than memorising the list: if a country has an obvious famous port, the capital is often somewhere inland you have not thought about.
Then the genuinely contested ones. Bolivia's constitutional capital is Sucre rather than La Paz, where the government actually sits. Tanzania's is Dodoma rather than Dar es Salaam. Benin's is Porto-Novo rather than Cotonou. Sri Lanka's is Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte. Each of those carries a note in the seed file saying so, and where even the official answer is contested the country was left out rather than guessed at.
The clue ladder
Three clues at a rung each. The region is first and is the weakest of the three, because the four options are already drawn from one region — it only helps when a small region had to be topped up from elsewhere, which does happen in Oceania.
The second clue is a fact about the city, written not to name it: that it sits in a coastal desert where it drizzles but almost never rains, or that its residents are called porteños after the port, or that its metro stations were built like palaces with chandeliers and mosaics. These are the best part of the game and worth reading even when you already know the answer. The third clue is the city's first letter.
The atlas behind it
124 countries: 28 in Africa, 24 each in Europe and Asia, 14 in North America and the Caribbean, 12 each in South America and the Middle East, and ten in Oceania. That same list is the answer catalog for the Street View game, so the two geography games never disagree about whether the answer is Côte d'Ivoire or Ivory Coast.
No network needed. The whole atlas is bundled with the site.
Scoring
Ten rounds, four rungs: 1000, 620, 380, 240. With four options and no clue spent, an outright guess is worth a quarter of 1000 on average, which is more than the last rung pays — so on a country you genuinely do not know, guessing immediately and then buying clues with what is left is better than the other way round.