Krillion Recorded answers
70 recorded answers
How to approach it
Work from climate mechanisms rather than from a memorised list of deserts. Ask which countries sit in a rain shadow, which hold a cold desert on a high plateau, which have a fog-fed coastal strip, and which are large enough to contain a continental interior that dries out far from the sea. That gives a long, varied pool of candidates. Then rank them by surprise: the more a country resists the word desert, the less crowded your answer is likely to be, and the more points it tends to carry. Before committing, check that the arid zone is genuinely inside the country's own borders and not in a dependency, and be ready to say which part of the country you mean.
Get a hint
Aridity is a question of rainfall, not heat, so widen the search to cold-winter deserts, high plateaus, rain-shadow valleys and coasts where a dry belt borders a wet one.
A little more
Move past the famous sand seas and ask which countries hold a dry fragment that rarely reaches the front of an atlas: a leeward shore, an interior basin, a border strip that hardly anyone visits.
One step further
The best-scoring entries tend to be states where the arid corner is small, arguable and far from the national image, including temperate, tropical and highland settings with a single dry basin.
Reveal answers 70
- United KingdomOne in a Krillion100points
- Burkina FasoDeep Cut85points
- Cabo VerdeDeep Cut85points
- CameroonDeep Cut85points
- ColombiaDeep Cut85points
- DenmarkDeep Cut85points
- EcuadorDeep Cut85points
- KyrgyzstanDeep Cut85points
- MadagascarDeep Cut85points
- MozambiqueDeep Cut85points
- NigeriaDeep Cut85points
- NorwayDeep Cut85points
- South SudanDeep Cut85points
- TajikistanDeep Cut85points
- VenezuelaDeep Cut85points
- AngolaRare60points
- ArgentinaRare60points
- AzerbaijanRare60points
- BahrainRare60points
- BoliviaRare60points
- BotswanaRare60points
- BrazilRare60points
- CanadaRare60points
- ChadRare60points
- DjiboutiRare60points
- EritreaRare60points
- EthiopiaRare60points
- KazakhstanRare60points
- KenyaRare60points
- KuwaitRare60points
- MaliRare60points
- MauritaniaRare60points
- NepalRare60points
- NigerRare60points
- OmanRare60points
- PeruRare60points
- QatarRare60points
- RussiaRare60points
- SenegalRare60points
- SomaliaRare60points
- SpainRare60points
- SyriaRare60points
- TurkmenistanRare60points
- UzbekistanRare60points
- YemenRare60points
- ZimbabweRare60points
- AfghanistanSchooler30points
- AlgeriaSchooler30points
- ChileSchooler30points
- ChinaSchooler30points
Why these answers count
The scoring here rewards distance from the obvious. Almost everyone's first instinct is a country of sand and relentless heat, and those answers were so crowded that they fell below the sixty-point band and never appear in the list above. The sixty-point group holds countries that do contain real aridity, but only in part: Kazakhstan, Russia, Spain, Peru, Brazil, Chad, Kenya, Yemen and their like, each defensible and still fairly easy to reach. The eighty-five tier moves further out, to states where the dry zone is a narrow corner or a genuine surprise — Burkina Faso, Cabo Verde, Cameroon, Colombia, Ecuador, Kyrgyzstan, Madagascar, Mozambique, Nigeria, South Sudan, Tajikistan, Venezuela. The single hundred-point entry, United Kingdom, is the pure outlier: a temperate island nobody pictures as desert, and precisely for that reason hardly anyone named it. A rare name pays more because few players reach it, but only when the climate claim survives inspection.