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The Straits & Crossings Quiz

The narrow waters that organise the map. Gibraltar to Malacca. This pack draws from 52 real places, and the quiz is not multiple choice: you get an unlabelled 3D globe, the name of a place, and 10 seconds to pin where it is. Points scale with how close you land and how fast you commit, so a near miss beats a wild stab and knowing beats guessing.

The narrow waters that organise the map

A strait is the one place where two bodies of water are forced past each other, and this pack is fifty-two of them, from Gibraltar to Malacca. What makes the pack distinctive is the scoring, which works two ways. About half the straits are drawn as shapes, so a pin anywhere on the water measures zero kilometres, and the smaller the passage the more it pays: the Davis Strait, hundreds of kilometres wide between Greenland and Baffin Island, pays about three-quarters even for a correct hit, while the Bosphorus, under a kilometre across, pays full marks. The rest, Hormuz, Dover and the Bering Strait among them, are single points scored like a city: full marks within 30 kilometres of the spot, less the further away you land. Knowing the name is half the answer; knowing whether you are pointing at a needle, a funnel or a dot is the other half.

The pack also mixes canals and passes in with the natural straits, because a canal is a strait someone dug. The Suez and Panama Canals are here, as are the Kiel and Corinth Canals. All of them are scored as single points, so aim for the middle of the cut rather than either end: the ends of the Suez Canal sit roughly 60 and 85 kilometres from its scoring point. The Khyber Pass is a land crossing rather than water, but it earns its place for the same reason: it is a chokepoint that constrains where traffic can go.

Three mental shortcuts for the wide ones

The two-land rule. Most straits are defined by the land on either side, so placing the two shores places the water. Gibraltar is Spain and Morocco; the Bering Strait is Alaska and Chukotka; the Taiwan Strait is the Chinese mainland and Taiwan. If you can name the pair of countries the clue implies, the strait sits between them, and your pin goes on the gap.

Follow the trade route. The great straits exist because shipping has no cheaper alternative, so they cluster where the world's traffic is thickest. Hormuz, Malacca, Bab-el-Mandeb and Suez form a chain from the Gulf to the Mediterranean that carries most of the world's oil, and the pack reflects that density. A strait between two globally familiar landmasses is almost always on a route you already half know.

Latitude before longitude. Straits are thin, so the latitude is usually the hard part. The Skagerrak and the Kattegat are both between Scandinavia and the continent, but the Skagerrak sits at the top of the Jutland peninsula while the Kattegat runs south toward the Danish islands. Cook Strait and Foveaux Strait are both New Zealand, but Cook cuts between the North and South Islands while Foveaux lies at the southern tip. Sort by latitude first and the longitude falls into place.

The passages that catch confident players

The straits that cost the most points are the ones that look like something they are not. The Øresund and the Great Belt both connect the Baltic to the North Sea, but the Øresund runs between Denmark and Sweden while the Great Belt lies wholly within Denmark, so a pin on the wrong one is a 150-kilometre miss. The Mozambique Channel is not a strait at all but a wide passage between Madagascar and the African mainland, so its feature size makes a correct hit worth less than a tight strait. And the Denmark Strait, between Iceland and Greenland, sits in the North Atlantic where nothing else is nearby, so an uncertain guess there is a long way from anything that scores.

For the seven straits that explain more of the map than the rest, and the history of why they became chokepoints, read Seven Straits That Explain the Map. For the broader skill of judging distance on a blank globe, which is what separates a tight passage from a wide one, How Far Is a Degree? turns latitude and longitude into kilometres.

How a run works

A run is 10 places sampled fresh from the pack each time, timed, and scored server-side onto the pack's own leaderboard. Your best run stands as your entry, and you can grind it down (or up) as long as you like. Free accounts get one ranked run a day; premium is unlimited.

Places you might be asked to pin

  • Bass Strait · Australia
  • Cook Strait · New Zealand
  • Foveaux Strait · New Zealand
  • Palk Strait · India / Sri Lanka
  • The Bab-el-Mandeb · Yemen / Djibouti
  • The Bering Strait · Russia / USA
  • The Bosphorus · Türkiye
  • The Cabot Strait · Canada
  • The Corinth Canal · Greece
  • The Dardanelles · Türkiye

…and 42 more across the pack.

Play the Straits & Crossings quiz

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