Games lab: 197 capitals, and the difficulty labels disagree with spelling

Games lab · geography channel

Left: stacked share of difficultyBase tiers 1–3 by UN-style region. Right: regional mean difficulty (1 = familiar, 3 = obscure). N = 197 countries in capitals-data.ts. Frozen summary: /data/globetrotter-capitals-lab.json. Exploratory — tiers are hand-labeled editorial judgment, not player telemetry.

Globetrotter asks for capitals, not vibes. The quiz engine weights spaced-repetition buckets in chaos mode and due dates in daily mode — but underneath both modes sits a static table: one capital per country, each tagged difficultyBase 1, 2, or 3. I ran the table through a counter instead of playing tourist.

The map is not flat.

Three numbers before the geography lecture

1. Hardest big region: Africa — mean difficulty 2.48, 50% of its 54 countries at tier 3. Only one African capital (Egypt → Cairo) still carries tier 1.
2. Easiest big region: Europe — mean 1.59, tier 3 share 11% (5 of 44). Northern Europe averages 1.40 across 10 countries.
3. Labels vs letters: Pearson r ≈ 0.16 between difficultyBase and capital name length. Spelling length barely predicts the tag. The workshop tagged familiarity, not character count.

That third point matters for anyone blaming a miss on “the word was long.” Sometimes it was. Often the label just thought you should know Praia (tier 3, five letters) but give yourself a pass on Washington, D.C. (tier 1, sixteen characters including punctuation).

The trap drawer

Define a trap capital as tier ≤ 2 but name length ≥ 9 characters — easy or medium on the label, awkward in the text box. The file contains 36 of them (18% of the deck).

Capital	Country	Tier	Length
Washington, D.C.	United States	1	16
Buenos Aires	Argentina	1	12
Kuala Lumpur	Malaysia	1	12
Mexico City	Mexico	1	11
Port-au-Prince	Haiti	2	14
Santo Domingo	Dominican Republic	2	13

These are not misprints. They encode a defensible bias: Americas and Asia tier-1 slots lean toward capitals that appear in headlines — not toward capitals that are short. The game’s fuzzy matcher (Levenshtein distance ≤ 2 for names ≥ 4 chars) forgives typos; it does not forgive not knowing that Bandar Seri Begawan exists.

At the other pole, nine tier-3 capitals have ≤ 5 letters — Juba, Dili, Apia, Suva. Short on the page, cruel in a speed round.

Subregions where the SRS will work overtime

Among subregions with ≥ 4 countries, the highest mean difficulties cluster where the globe gets sparse:

• Micronesia — 3.00 (n = 5; every row tier 3)
• Melanesia — 2.75 (n = 4)
• Western Africa — 2.69 (n = 16)
• Eastern Africa — 2.50 (n = 18)

The Caribbean (14 countries, mean 2.43) punches above its beach-resort reputation: hyphenated ports and compound names, not just tier tags.

Oceania looks brutal in the chart (78.6% tier 3, mean 2.64) but remember n = 14. One region, many microstates — high variance, small sample. Treat it as directional, not a theorem about Australians’ geography skills.

Longest spellings by tier (for the masochists)

• Tier 1: Washington, D.C. (16) — still the longest “easy” row.
• Tier 2: Guatemala City / Port-au-Prince (14 each).
• Tier 3: Sri Jayawardenepura Kotte (25). Of course.

Only 19 capitals (9.6%) ship capitalAltNames — alternate spellings the matcher accepts. Most of the forgiveness is fuzzy distance, not explicit aliases.

What this does not say

No player logs were harmed in this audit. We did not measure actual miss rates, time-on-card, or whether chaos mode’s 5× weight on “learning” buckets saves anyone in Western Africa. This is a deck inspection, not proof that tier 3 rows fail more often in production.

If you want the felt difficulty, play the game. If you want the deck geometry, open the JSON.

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Re-run

python3 scripts/globetrotter_capitals_lab/analyze.py
pip install matplotlib numpy
python3 scripts/globetrotter_capitals_lab/plot_chart.py

Source of truth for country rows: apps/web/app/globetrotter/capitals-data.ts. Edit tiers there; re-freeze the JSON when the table moves.

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