Pack
Biggest countries by population
Round
1
Score
0
Best
—
Lives

Put these in order, smallest first. Round 1, 3 tiles.

Smallest

Largest

Tap a tile to place it. Drag a placed tile to reorder, or tap it to pick it up.

Biggest countries by population

Put these in order, smallest first. A round deals 3 of 197 to begin with and up to 6 as the run goes on, and it clears only when every tile is where it belongs. You start with 3 lives; a round that does not clear costs one, and 5 cleared in a row earn one back.

The mind handles size by adding, and populations only make sense by multiplying. Asked to put five countries in order, most people reach for a sense of how much bigger one is than another, and the sense runs in steps of the same size: big, bigger, biggest. The figures run in steps that are each several times the last. The Vatican has fewer than a thousand people. Tuvalu has about twelve times as many. China has about 1.6 million times as many as the Vatican, and the sixty-four smallest countries on the list, taken together, have fewer people than the United Kingdom.

The crowded middle and the empty top

A hundred and forty-four of the 197 have between one million and a hundred million people, and that band is where rounds are won and lost. It is packed with countries of the same order of size and no obvious rank: Norway, Finland, Singapore and Denmark are all within six per cent of one another, so a round can hold only one of them. The middle country of the whole line, Papua New Guinea, has under nine million.

The surprising neighbours all live in that band. Ireland and the Central African Republic differ by a few thousand people. Haiti and Cuba are practically level. The United Kingdom sits between Thailand and France, all three within four per cent. Canada sits just above Morocco and just below Poland; Australia sits between North Korea and Yemen. None of these pairs could share a round, but any one of them can turn up next to a country you would have put on the other side of it.

At the top the line thins out completely. After the United States the next step is to India, which has nearly four times as many people, and it is the biggest jump anywhere on the line except the first. India and China together hold about a third of everyone in the pack. A tile from either is about the easiest placement in the game.

What the line is built from

The figures are the ones Wikidata ranks first, and they were counted in different years. In a pair that is a caveat; in a line it compounds, because every tile in a round was dated on its own. A round of five countries within a factor of two of one another can be a comparison between five different years, and the order you are marked against is the order of the counts.

The line is also even-handed about the small. Keeping close neighbours apart costs no country its turn: every one is dealt about as often as every other, so Tuvalu turns up as often as Brazil. Most people have a much better sense of the top twenty than of the bottom fifty, so the rounds that feel hardest are probably the ones made of islands.

Questions

Why are the countries in a round never close in size?
Because in any round, the larger of two countries has at least fifteen per cent more people than the smaller. Outdo’s near miss on the same figures is ten per cent, and inside that the order can be more about which year each country was counted in than about the countries. The margin is rounded up so that no round ever asks for a call the figures cannot really support.
Why is the pack called biggest countries when the line starts with the smallest?
Because “biggest” is how people ask the question, and the line has to start somewhere. Every round is laid out smallest first, the Vatican end first and the China end last. The title describes what the pack is about rather than which end you begin at.
Do I need to get every tile right?
Yes. A round clears when the whole line is in order and costs a life otherwise, with no partial credit. The reveal shows each tile marked right or wrong where you put it, with its figure, which makes a missed round a quick lesson in where a country actually sits.
Is every country here?
Every sovereign state Outdo’s pack has, which is all 197, with nothing filtered out. That includes the microstates most people cannot place, because leaving them out would take away the rounds that most reward a sense of scale rather than a memory for figures.
Does it work without JavaScript?
You can read the whole page and see the opening round, because it is built as HTML before anything runs. Moving the tiles needs JavaScript, since there is no server to send an arrangement to.

Where the figures come from

  • Wikidata, under CC0 1.0. Retrieved 2026-09-15.

    The sovereign states as Wikidata classifies them, excluding former ones, with no population floor. Names are Wikidata's English labels, except where a label is the formal style of the name players use: the People's Republic of China appears as China. Each figure comes from the country's highest-ranked population statements, so a newer figure Wikidata ranks below an older one is not used. Where more than one statement shares the top rank, the figure is the one with the most recent point in time — not the largest, which would report a decade-old census wherever a population has fallen. The figures are not all from the same year: asOf records the oldest in the set.

Data updated 22 September 2026, figures as of 2005. Regenerated at least every 365 days.

Image credits