How to Play Capitalle — Complete Beginner's Guide
May 2026
Capitalle is a free daily geography game where your goal is to identify the mystery world capital city in six guesses or fewer. Every day a new capital is chosen from the 195 recognised countries and dependent territories of the world, and players around the globe race to figure it out using a system of distance and direction hints. If you have played Wordle before, the concept will feel familiar — but instead of letters, you are working with maps and geography knowledge.
The Basic Rules
Each day, one capital city is selected as the answer. You begin with a completely blank slate — no clues, no continent hint, nothing. Type any capital city name into the search field and submit your guess. After each guess, you receive two pieces of information: how far your guess is from the target capital (measured in kilometres), and the compass direction you should look from your guess to find the target.
You have six guesses in total. If you identify the capital within those six attempts, you win and receive a share card showing your result. If you use all six without finding it, the answer is revealed. A new puzzle resets every day at midnight in your local time zone, so there is always a fresh challenge waiting for you.
Start today's Capitalle puzzle →
Understanding the Distance and Direction Hints
The distance hint tells you, in kilometres, how far your guessed capital is from the correct answer measured in a straight line across the Earth's surface. A guess of 0 km means you have found the correct capital. A guess that shows 2,000 km means the target is 2,000 km away from the capital you named. Lower numbers mean you are getting closer.
The direction hint is shown as a compass arrow pointing from your guess toward the target. North, Northeast, East, Southeast, South, Southwest, West, and Northwest are the eight possible directions. So if you guess London and the arrow points Southeast and shows 4,200 km, you know the answer is somewhere to the southeast of London at roughly that distance — which would put you in the vicinity of Central or East Africa.
A proximity bar or percentage indicator sometimes appears alongside these hints, showing how close you are as a percentage of the maximum possible distance on Earth (roughly 20,000 km). A proximity score above 80% means you are within a few hundred kilometres and should be able to narrow it down quickly.
What Makes a Good Opening Guess
Your first guess is the most important strategic move in any Capitalle game. Because you have no information yet, you want to choose a starting capital that gives you the maximum amount of useful directional information no matter where the answer turns out to be. The best opening guesses are capitals of geographically central countries — countries that sit near the middle of the inhabited world.
Addis Ababa (Ethiopia) is often cited as one of the best opening guesses because it sits roughly at the geographic centre of the world's landmasses. A guess from Addis Ababa will never return a distance of more than about 13,000 km, and the directional arrow will always be meaningful. Other solid first guesses include Nairobi (Kenya), Khartoum (Sudan), Riyadh (Saudi Arabia), or Delhi (India). These central locations ensure your first hint cuts the possible remaining answers roughly in half by hemisphere or region.
Avoid starting with extreme capitals like Reykjavik (Iceland) or Wellington (New Zealand) — these are geographically peripheral, meaning a large portion of the world is in roughly the same direction from them, making the directional hint less useful.
Using Continent Matching and Regional Narrowing
Once you have your first hint, the key is to think in regions rather than trying to guess a specific country. If your opening guess in Addis Ababa points Northwest and shows 6,000 km, you can immediately rule out all of Africa, all of Asia, and most of South America. That distance and direction from East Africa points toward Western Europe or the North Atlantic — a much smaller pool of capitals to work through.
Use your second guess to drop a capital in the middle of the region you have identified. If the arrow pointed northwest and you land somewhere in Central Europe, the third hint will reveal whether you need to go further north, further west, or whether you are already close. By your third or fourth guess, most experienced players have narrowed the answer to a handful of countries in a single sub-region.
Continent boundaries are especially useful because each arrow direction from a central starting point maps roughly onto a continent or ocean zone. Northeast from Central Africa usually means Asia. South means southern Africa or Antarctica. West means the Americas. Train your mental map to associate directions from your opening guess with broad continental zones.
Strategy Tips for Consistent Wins
The players who solve Capitalle in three or four guesses consistently share a few habits. First, they always use the same opening guess. Having a fixed starter removes decision fatigue and means you build up a mental database of what different first-hint combinations mean. Second, they think in clusters — after narrowing to a region, they guess the most geographically central capital of that region rather than the most famous one.
For example, if you have narrowed to Southeast Asia, do not immediately guess Bangkok or Hanoi. Instead, try Phnom Penh (Cambodia) or Vientiane (Laos) — capitals in the geographic middle of the region — to get a directional hint that splits the remaining possibilities cleanly.
Third, learn the capitals that share similar geographic locations but are in different countries: Bratislava and Vienna are just 60 km apart, Brussels and Amsterdam are very close, and several West African capitals are within a few hundred kilometres of each other. Knowing these clusters helps you distinguish between possibilities when your distance hint is small but you have already guessed the obvious one.
Finally, use the share card to track your progress over time. The share card shows your streak, your average number of guesses, and your guess distribution. Aiming for a streak of consistent wins is more rewarding than trying to occasionally get a lucky one-guess fluke.
Practice Mode and Other Games
If you want to sharpen your capital knowledge before tackling the daily puzzle, Capitalle also offers a range of complementary games. Earthle challenges you to identify a country from its geographic silhouette — great for building shape-recognition skills that feed back into your capital knowledge. Travle asks you to trace a country-by-country route between two locations, drilling your knowledge of borders and proximity. Ranke tests whether you can order countries by statistics like population or GDP, which builds the kind of comparative geographic thinking that helps in Capitalle.
Playing all of Capitalle's games as part of a daily routine will develop your world geography knowledge faster than studying alone. Each game trains a different mental model — shapes, routes, statistics, logos, connections — and together they create a comprehensive geography skillset. The more you play, the faster your Capitalle solve times will become.