Krillion Recorded answers
96 recorded answers
How to approach it
Two routes reach the threshold, and working both is what fills the board. The first is legal: scan every state where English holds official, co-official or de facto administrative status, then strip out those with populations so large that the share falls short. The second is empirical: run through international proficiency surveys and keep the countries where self-reported ability clears fifty per cent, which pulls in places with no colonial history at all. Size is your friend here, because a small population makes a high percentage easier to reach, and the puzzle rewards the small and the overlooked. Rank candidates by how rarely they appear in ordinary conversation about world languages, and lead with the least familiar name you can defend.
Get a hint
Start from the language map rather than the atlas: think about which states gave English a formal role in law, schooling or administration at some point in the last two centuries.
A little more
Weight it by population, not by landmass: a handful of thousand-strong island communities and several mid-sized African states sit comfortably above the halfway mark.
One step further
Then allow for the surprise entries: a cluster of continental European countries where surveys put everyday second-language use near or past the halfway point, even without any colonial tie.
Reveal answers 96
- MaldivesRare60points
- MaltaRare60points
- MauritiusRare60points
- NigeriaRare60points
- OmanRare60points
- PakistanRare60points
- PalestineRare60points
- PhilippinesRare60points
- PolandRare60points
- PortugalRare60points
- QatarRare60points
- SamoaRare60points
- Saudi ArabiaRare60points
- SeychellesRare60points
- South KoreaRare60points
- Sri LankaRare60points
- TanzaniaRare60points
- Trinidad and TobagoRare60points
- UgandaRare60points
- UruguayRare60points
- ZambiaRare60points
- ZimbabweRare60points
- DenmarkSchooler30points
- FinlandSchooler30points
- FranceSchooler30points
- GermanySchooler30points
- IcelandSchooler30points
- IsraelSchooler30points
- ItalySchooler30points
- NetherlandsSchooler30points
- New ZealandSchooler30points
- Northern IrelandSchooler30points
- NorwaySchooler30points
- ScotlandSchooler30points
- SingaporeSchooler30points
- South AfricaSchooler30points
- SwedenSchooler30points
- SwitzerlandSchooler30points
- United Arab EmiratesSchooler30points
- WalesSchooler30points
- AustraliaPlankton10points
- CanadaPlankton10points
- EnglandPlankton10points
- IrelandPlankton10points
- United KingdomPlankton10points
- United StatesPlankton10points
Why these answers count
The scoring mirrors how quickly a name comes to mind. Familiar, heavily publicised candidates anchored the sixty-point tier: Bahamas (60), Jamaica (60), Nigeria (60) and the Philippines (60) are the sort of answers most players reach within seconds, and their ubiquity caps their value. The eighty-five band belongs to states that are correct but rarely volunteered: Latvia (85), Eswatini (85), Nauru (85) and Tuvalu (85) reward a player who knows the underlying fact rather than the famous example. Only one entry reached the top, Papua New Guinea (100), and it did so precisely because it is the answer almost nobody thinks of first, despite sitting at the extreme end of everyday second-language use. The pattern is consistent: correctness gets you on the board, obscurity sets your score. A well-known country with a defensible claim will still pay sixty, while an unfamiliar one with the same claim pays eighty-five or better, so the winning habit is to exhaust the small and the overlooked before naming anything obvious.