Straight through the Earth

A country is named and the starting point is its capital. Dig straight down and out the other side: what do you surface in? Pick from four options, which can be countries, oceans or seas, and a globe then shows both sides of the Earth. Ten questions make a round.

Most of the time the answer is water. Of the 195 capitals in the game, 162 have open ocean opposite them, 126 of those the Pacific, and 14 come up in a named sea: Buenos Aires and Montevideo in the Yellow Sea, La Paz in the South China Sea, Lisbon in the Tasman Sea. Only 19 capitals have another country on the far side.

The land antipodes worth knowing

Beijing is opposite Argentina and Santiago is opposite China. Madrid and Wellington are antipodes of each other, and so are Lima and Phnom Penh, Jakarta and Bogotá, Kuala Lumpur and Quito. Ulaanbaatar comes out in Chile, Manila in Brazil. The Pacific islands are opposite West Africa: Fiji to Mali, Tonga to Algeria, Tuvalu to Ghana, Samoa to Niger, Vanuatu to Mauritania.

Why the levels ask differently

Because so many answers are “the Pacific Ocean”, no answer is allowed more than four times a round. Easy uses the 50 best-known countries and only the familiar seas; Medium the next 50 and every major sea. Hard uses the remaining 95 countries, allows at most three ocean answers a round and asks the rest as “you surface in open ocean: which country is closest?”. Mixed draws from all 195 countries with both kinds of question.