Africa Puzzle Empire asks you to match tiles. Shaka asks you to move regiments. ELK Atlas asks you a question, and the honest difficulty of building it was not the questions — it was making sure the answers are true.
Choose a continent, then a country
A round is ten questions about one place, drawn from four levels of difficulty and ten shapes of question: capitals, borders, populations, currencies, languages, coastlines, comparisons. Every country in the world is in it, and the game is meant to work for a ten-year-old and for an adult who thinks they know the map.
Where the facts come from
Two public sources, both credited in the game:
- Wikidata, released under CC0, for the countries themselves — names,
capitals, populations, currencies, official languages, and the identifiers that tie them together.
- Natural Earth at 1:10 million, public domain, for the shapes.
Nothing is typed in by hand, because a hand-typed atlas is a set of typos waiting to be quoted back at a child.
What went wrong, and what it taught us
Twelve defects, and none of them looked like a bug.
Borders that were not borders. Wikidata's "shares border with" includes maritime boundaries, so the first version cheerfully asked which country borders Mozambique and offered Kiribati. The fix was to stop asking a database and start measuring: two countries share a land border when their polygons share vertices.
An identifier that did not exist. One query used a Wikidata property that had been renamed. It returned zero rows, silently, and zero rows looks exactly like "no data for this country" — so the gap sat there looking like a fact about the world.
Twelve continents. Wikidata records several overlapping schemes, so Oceania appeared three times under three names. Reduced to the seven a schoolchild would recognise, with the others mapped onto them.
France and Yemen in the Africa round. Both are African in the data — Mayotte and Socotra — and both are absurd answers to a question about Africa. The rule that fixed it is a sentence: a country belongs where most of its neighbours are.
A question that names its own answer. "What is the capital of Singapore?"
Wrong answers that give themselves away. "Which is an official language of Nigeria? Khoisan languages · Australian Sign Language · New Zealand Sign Language · English." Every wrong answer is true somewhere, so every correctness check passed — and a child eliminates three of them without knowing anything about Nigeria.
Distractors from the wrong hemisphere. An Africa round asking for the capital of Egypt, offering Ljubljana, Canberra and Quito. Found by a test that printed the options it had seen, not by a test that checked whether the answers were right. They were all right. They were just not a question.
The one thing the platform does differently here
Every other game on ELK GameVerse works the same way: your device sends what you did, the server replays it, and the score it computes is the one that counts.
A quiz cannot work like that, because knowing the seed of a round is knowing its answers. So ELK Atlas inverts it. The server builds the round, sends the questions without the key, and grades what comes back. The session seed and the round seed are different values, and the second never leaves the server.
That is checked the way everything load-bearing here is checked: by breaking it on purpose. With the projection disabled, the opening response carries "answers":[1,1,3,0,1,2,3,0,3,0] in plain sight, and a browser test fails while quoting it back.
Not published yet
ELK Atlas is built and playable, and it is not in the catalogue. It is registered for players from ten years old, and that is a legal statement rather than a label: below thirteen, COPPA and Article 8 of the GDPR change what is permitted in advertising, analytics and account creation. That decision is open, and the game waits for it.