Krillion Recorded answers
858 recorded answers
How to approach it
Work at the middle scale, because that is where named regions live: bigger than a province, smaller than a continent. Generate candidates in families rather than one at a time. Physical names come first: mountain chains, plateaus, river catchments, deltas, deserts, seas and their coasts. Ecological names come next: forest belts, savannas, scrub and reef zones mapped by conservation bodies. Then human names: historical provinces, cultural and linguistic borderlands, trade corridors, imperial leftovers, and territories whose names predate the states now sitting on them. For each candidate, run a border check and ask whether the name really reaches into at least two present-day countries. Discard whatever stops inside one frontier, then rank the survivors by specificity, since precision separates a strong entry from a vague one.
Get a hint
Start with the scale in between a single country and a whole continent: names at that level usually describe shared terrain, shared climate, or a shared cultural inheritance.
A little more
Then test the name against a map of frontiers: the strongest candidates straddle a border or a tripoint, and many were fixed by geology, drainage or language rather than by any treaty.
One step further
Rarity pays, so move past the obvious blocks and look for smaller cross-border names: upland massifs, desert margins, transitional coastlines, ethnolinguistic marches, and ecological zones drawn by conservation bodies.
Reveal answers 858
- PolesiaOne in a Krillion100points
- Acacia–Commiphora bushlandDeep Cut85points
- AcadiaDeep Cut85points
- Accursed MountainsDeep Cut85points
- Adamawa PlateauDeep Cut85points
- AegeanDeep Cut85points
- Aegean IslandsDeep Cut85points
- AethiopiaDeep Cut85points
- Afar TriangleDeep Cut85points
- African Great LakesDeep Cut85points
- AfromontaneDeep Cut85points
- Afrotropical realmDeep Cut85points
- Akwapim-Togo RangesDeep Cut85points
- Alay MountainsDeep Cut85points
- Albertine RiftDeep Cut85points
- Albertine Rift montane forestsDeep Cut85points
- AlemanniaDeep Cut85points
- Aleutian IslandsDeep Cut85points
- Alpine ForelandDeep Cut85points
- Altai MountainsDeep Cut85points
- AltiplanoDeep Cut85points
- Amu Darya basinDeep Cut85points
- Amur basinDeep Cut85points
- Ancient LibyaDeep Cut85points
- Andaman Sea regionDeep Cut85points
- Andean statesDeep Cut85points
- Anglo-AmericaDeep Cut85points
- Anglo-Scottish border regionDeep Cut85points
- Anglophone AfricaDeep Cut85points
- Anglophone CaribbeanDeep Cut85points
- Angolan miombo woodlandsDeep Cut85points
- Annamite RangeDeep Cut85points
- Anti-Lebanon MountainsDeep Cut85points
- AntillesDeep Cut85points
- AntipodesDeep Cut85points
- ApacheríaDeep Cut85points
- ApenninesDeep Cut85points
- Arab worldDeep Cut85points
- ArabahDeep Cut85points
- Arabia DesertaDeep Cut85points
- Arabia FelixDeep Cut85points
- Arabia PetraeaDeep Cut85points
- Arabian DesertDeep Cut85points
- Arabophone AfricaDeep Cut85points
- ArachosiaDeep Cut85points
- Aral Sea basinDeep Cut85points
- Aralkum DesertDeep Cut85points
- AramDeep Cut85points
- ArdennesDeep Cut85points
- AridoamericaDeep Cut85points
Why these answers count
With 791 of 838 recorded answers clearing sixty points, this was a generous, flat-scoring question: the reveal accepted almost anything that genuinely straddles a border, then paid by how obscure the pick was. Only one entry, Polesia, reached 100: the classic deep cut, a marsh-and-forest territory most solvers would never retrieve, while the bulk of the field settled on 85-point names. Those 85s span every register: ecological units such as Acacia–Commiphora bushland, historical territories such as Assyria, and physical features such as the Altai Mountains. Language-based, colonial-era and conservation-body names all did well because each is a genuinely named region with a real multi-country footprint, which is the test the puzzle applied. The 102 answers at 60 look like the broad, obvious end of the market, plausible but heavily shared, so the curve rewarded detail over safety. The lesson is that once a pick clears the border test, obscurity is the only lever left, and ecological or pre-modern historical names tend to be the least crowded shelf.