These webpages help you to learn various geographical facts through very simple map games. You can learn the countries of the world, the states in the USA, the counties of England, and the main rivers and seas of the world.

The webpages contain very simple maps. When you start the game, the names disappear. You are given the colour of one of the countries (or counties or states), and you must identify the name, which is then replaced on the map. If you want, you can choose which colour to identify. This is easier, as you can identify the countries you know, and then see what's left! The rivers and seas are identified with question marks rather than colours, but otherwise work the same way.

It is possible to use these webpages to learn the countries of the world. It would be useful as an introduction to a Geography project or as General Knowledge for schools. After all, people say "Children today don't know where this or that country is!" But since many countries have changed their names, or come into existence in the last few decades, so even well-educated adults might like to brush up their knowledge. Of course, you can also use these webpages as a very simple sort of atlas without playing the game at all. There is a list of countries with a link to the correct map, which will be useful for looking up countries. There is also a World map where you can click to get to an area's map.

Unfortunately, these webpages use colours to identify countries. I realise that this means that colour blind people may find it hard to distinguish between some of the colours, and hence play the game. If you are using this with a class, I suggest you pair children, making sure that you don't have any colour blind pairs!

Each map has a maximum of 13 countries and most have less. The divisions are roughly along logical lines, but there are some peculiarities! Sometimes I have chosen groups of countries which are roughly the same size, so I can make the scale as big as possible, as in West Africa. The bigger countries of West Africa had to go onto a different map. Some countries are isolated. There are only two countries in North America, for example, and most of the countries in Central America are small and need their own map. So I have put Mexico, Greenland and Iceland on that map, although Iceland is definitely in Europe, Greenland is part of Denmark, and Mexico is Central America. But it was the only way to give enough countries to make it a reasonable game. The map of Australia and New Zealand also had to include the East Indies to give enough countries. So please do not assume that these divisions are necessarily orthodox ones. I have tried to include countries with similar names on the same map (such as Niger and Nigeria). I have also tried to put countries on the same map which are associated together (unfortunately usually because they have been at war with each other, like Kuwait and Iraq).

The maps had to be on different scales. Countries like Canada or Australia are very large, while the West African countries are small. I have given a scale number to give a rough idea. This will be very rough. I cannot give a proper scale as these are flat maps over a wide area. This means that the type of map projection will distort the distances and directions. The scale might well be different from one part of the map to another! So the scale number tries to give an indication of scale. I have used the Robinson projection for most of the maps, but the North America map uses Lambert Conformal Conic Projection, standard parallels 37 N and 65 N. This makes the Bring Straits area and Iceland/Greenland look titled, but the areas are quite good. The other maps which make some countries look strange are the Far East (where Russia is wrong) and Northern and Central Europe (where Finland is too big)! You're never going to get it all right with a flat map, of course. I suggest that teachers use a globe to show children what countries really look like.

Obviously not all countries of the world appear on these maps as some are too small, or too far away from any other country. In the list of countries, I have included some other countries, with a rough indication of where they are. I suggest that you use a good atlas to find them! The list includes every country in the UN, plus a few more than I wanted to include. Let me know if you want me to include any more, but they won't be included on the maps, just the index. In fact, some of the countries on the maps are not independent, but part of other countries, such as French Guyana (part of France).

I could not cover all the rivers and seas of the world, so here I have tried to select those that I thought were important. The American states and the English counties work in a similar way, and they have a few facts or pictures connected with them. If there seems to be an English / American bias here, then I must admit that I am English, and I created these pages at the suggestion of an American friend of mine.