Krillion Recorded answers
27 recorded answers
How to approach it
Work region by region, because recall stalls when you search an undifferentiated list of nearly two hundred states. Take one continent at a time and enumerate every name you can produce, writing them down so nothing doubles back. Then apply the letter count as a mechanical filter, marking each candidate and discarding anything that runs long, splits into two words, or needs an abbreviation. The shortlist is usually longer than expected, and the puzzle rewards volume, so push past the first two or three names that come to mind and keep going until each region is exhausted. Finally, verify spelling rather than trusting memory, since plenty of familiar short names hide an extra letter or drop one, and favor the least obvious entries, because rarity is what scores.
Get a hint
Begin at the scale of the whole planet and sort the map by region rather than by memory; entire continents offer several candidates once you start counting letters.
A little more
Now impose the letter count as a filter: write out short names you can recall and delete every one that runs to four, six or more characters.
One step further
Finish by checking survivors against an index: some familiar short names carry a hidden extra letter, others are shorter than memory suggests.
Reveal answers 27
- NauruOne in a Krillion100points
- BeninDeep Cut85points
- GabonDeep Cut85points
- PalauDeep Cut85points
- TongaDeep Cut85points
- BurmaRare60points
- LibyaRare60points
- MaltaRare60points
- NigerRare60points
- QatarRare60points
- SamoaRare60points
- SudanRare60points
- SyriaRare60points
- WalesRare60points
- YemenRare60points
- ChileSchooler30points
- CongoSchooler30points
- EgyptSchooler30points
- GhanaSchooler30points
- HaitiSchooler30points
- KenyaSchooler30points
- NepalSchooler30points
- SpainSchooler30points
- ChinaPlankton10points
- IndiaPlankton10points
- ItalyPlankton10points
- JapanPlankton10points
Why these answers count
Scoring here tracks how quickly a name comes to mind for the crowd, and the spread across the 27 recorded answers shows it plainly. The 100-point entry, Nauru, is a country most players cannot place on a map at all, so almost nobody wrote it first; Benin, Gabon, Palau and Tonga followed at 85, familiar enough to be recalled by some solvers but rarely the first name on anyone's list. The ten answers at 60, Burma, Libya, Malta, Niger, Qatar, Samoa, Sudan, Syria, Wales and Yemen, are the routine picks, the ones that surface within seconds and therefore get shared by a large slice of players, which caps their value. Twelve further entries fell below that line and their scores are not listed, so the visible pattern is really about distance from the obvious rather than obscurity for its own sake. The practical lesson: the common short names are the floor, not the ceiling, and a solver who pushes past the obvious handful will usually beat one who stops at the first name that fits.