Week 1: Anchor countries

Play Map the Planet daily, but don't chase a perfect score yet. Focus on locking in the 30-40 largest, most geographically distinct countries: Russia, Canada, the USA, China, Brazil, Australia, India, Argentina, Kazakhstan, Algeria, Egypt, South Africa, Turkey, Indonesia, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Mongolia, Peru, and Chad among them.

These become your reference points for everything else.

Split it across the week: days one and two, the Americas (Canada, USA, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Peru, Colombia); days three and four, Africa and the Middle East (Algeria, Egypt, Chad, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran).

Days five and six, Asia-Pacific (Russia, China, India, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, Indonesia, Australia); day seven, a mixed review round pulling from all three groups.

The goal this week is coverage of the map's skeleton, not completeness. Every anchor you lock in makes a handful of smaller neighbours easier next week, because you'll be learning them relative to something rather than from scratch.

Uruguay sits next to Argentina and Brazil, Jordan next to Saudi Arabia and Israel, Laos wedged between Thailand, Vietnam and China.

Week 2: Regional clusters

Pick one region per day and drill just that cluster in Map the Planet until you can place all of them without hesitation. Regions are smaller and more learnable in a single sitting than the whole map.

A rough seven-day split that covers the large majority of countries people miss:

Day 1: West Africa (Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Côte d'Ivoire, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Nigeria, Niger). Day 2: East and Central Africa (Ethiopia, Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi, DR Congo, Congo, Gabon, Cameroon). Day 3: Southern Africa (Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique, Namibia, Botswana, South Africa, Lesotho, Eswatini, Malawi).

Day 4: the Balkans and Eastern Europe (Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Albania, Romania, Bulgaria, Moldova). Day 5: Central Asia and the Caucasus (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan).

Day 6: Southeast Asia and Oceania (Thailand, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Myanmar, Malaysia, Philippines, Papua New Guinea, Fiji). Day 7: Central America and the Caribbean (Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, Dominican Republic).

Week 3: Flags in parallel

Start daily Flag Down runs. By now you already know most of these countries' locations, so you're only learning one new thing (the flag) instead of two.

Keep playing Map the Planet as well, since the two reinforce each other, because a flag attached to a place you can already find is a much stickier memory than a flag on its own.

This is also the week to attack the near-identical pairs deliberately, comparing them side by side rather than meeting them one at a time mid-run: Chad and Romania (both plain blue-yellow-red vertical), Indonesia and Monaco (identical red-over-white, different proportions).

Also compare Netherlands and Luxembourg (near-identical stripes, different shades of blue), Ireland and Côte d'Ivoire (the same three colours, reversed), and Australia and New Zealand (same navy field and stars, different star count and Union Jack canton details).

Group your flag drilling by design family rather than by country name: Pan-African green-yellow-red flags (Ethiopia, Ghana, Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Cameroon), Pan-Arab red-white-black-green flags (Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Sudan, Jordan, Palestine).

Nordic-cross flags (Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland) each cluster nicely and are easiest to tell apart once you've studied them as a set rather than in isolation.

Week 4: Weak-spot triage

Spend your last week almost entirely on your specific gaps rather than reviewing everything evenly. Keep a running note of every country or flag you miss during the week and drill only that list. Ten countries you reliably get wrong are worth far more attention than a hundred you already know.

A practical rule: if you got it right twice in a row, drop it from the list. If you missed it twice, look up one concrete anchoring fact about it, like a neighbour, a coastline or a capital, rather than just staring at it again.

For example, if Guyana keeps slipping your mind, anchor it as "the English-speaking one, next to Suriname and Venezuela, capital Georgetown" rather than trying to memorise its shape from nothing.

By day five or six of this week, most people's weak list has shrunk to a genuinely stubborn handful, usually small island nations (Comoros, Vanuatu, Kiribati), landlocked countries with unfamiliar shapes (Lesotho, Eswatini, Bhutan), or capitals that don't match the country name intuitively (Myanmar/Naypyidaw, Sri Lanka/Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte).

That's normal. Give those specifically one extra round on the final day rather than repeating the whole map.

Throughout: keep sessions short

Fifteen minutes a day beats two hours on a Sunday, and it isn't close. Spaced practice with a little forgetting in between is what produces retention that survives past the exam.

If you have extra time, add a second short session later in the day rather than extending the first one. A morning round and an evening round beats one long lunchtime session, because you get two separate retrieval attempts instead of one.