Hi everyone,

welcome to the October 2024 edition of #fridaygeotrivia, our a social media geotrivia contest. We play on the final Friday of every month.

The game will be played on Friday, 25th of October, at 17:00 Berlin time, 4pm London time, 11am New York time.

See how to play below.

The October 2024 geotrivia question:

Which country is the best place to live? Hard to say but one metric you could use is HDI (Human Development Index).

Every country has a score from 0 to 1. Current world leader is Switzerland.

What is the longest chain of countries such that each successive country in the chain shares a land border with and has an HDI score greater than the previous country?

So, as an example, a chain of three would be Andorra to France to Spain

"HDI chain from AD to FR to ES"

You can see the full HDI ranking over on wikipedia.

"the HDI list"

As always:

  • Only one answer per toot

  • You must include the hashtag #fridaygeotrivia and the emoji flag of relevant countries

Prizes

#fridaygeotrivia is a game with two prizes:

  1. the sheer joy of geographic knowledge and pedantry.

  2. the bragging rights of getting the answer first.

The #fridaygeotrivia Mastodon thread:

Post by @opencage@en.osm.town
View on Mastodon

The winner

Congrats go to Thomas Preece for discovering the winning 17 country chain. Well done!

Second place went to SK53

Well done to everyone for playing, this was a tricky one.

This monthโ€™s geotrivia answer:

Afghanistan ๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡ซ - Tajikistan ๐Ÿ‡น๐Ÿ‡ฏ - Kyrgyzstan ๐Ÿ‡ฐ๐Ÿ‡ฌ - Uzbekistan ๐Ÿ‡บ๐Ÿ‡ฟ - Turkmenistan ๐Ÿ‡น๐Ÿ‡ฒ - Iran ๐Ÿ‡ฎ๐Ÿ‡ท - Azerbaijan ๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡ฟ - Armenia ๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡ฒ - Georgia ๐Ÿ‡ฌ๐Ÿ‡ช - Russia ๐Ÿ‡ท๐Ÿ‡บ - Latvia ๐Ÿ‡ฑ๐Ÿ‡ป - Lithuania ๐Ÿ‡ฑ๐Ÿ‡น - Poland ๐Ÿ‡ต๐Ÿ‡ฑ - Czechia ๐Ÿ‡จ๐Ÿ‡ฟ - Austria ๐Ÿ‡ฆ๐Ÿ‡น - Liechtenstein ๐Ÿ‡ฑ๐Ÿ‡ฎ - Switzerland ๐Ÿ‡จ๐Ÿ‡ญ

How to play

Anyone can join in, you just need a Mastodon account.

  • Follow us on Mastodon, our account is @opencage@en.osm.town

  • When the game starts we will post the question here on the blog and on Mastodon, and will embed the Mastodon question here. We highly recommend using a mastodon client you feel comfortable with. Weโ€™ve made the switch to the Elk client and are loving it, but use whatever works for you.

  • Reply to the question thread on Mastodon (it will be embedded above) using the hashtag #fridaygeotrivia in your answer.

  • Only one answer per response (donโ€™t stuff multiple answers into a single reply).

  • Our definition of โ€œcountryโ€ is usually (it depends on the question) any place with an ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code. Read more background about ISO and country codes in our guide.

  • To get full points for an answer it is good form not just to name the relevant country but (if possible) to include the emoji flags of the country.

  • While you can use a map, please do NOT use the internet to just search for an answer. That is cheating and will lead to seriously bad geokarma.

Some people have complained that the format is a bit chaotic and hard to follow. Yes. The mad chaos is part of the fun. Embrace it. The goal is just to have fun and learn. We win by playing

Thanks for playing,

Ed