What is Border Chain?
Border Chain is a free daily geography game. Every day at midnight UTC, everyone in the world gets the same two countries — a start and a destination, always between 4 and 8 land borders apart. Your job: connect them by naming a chain of neighboring countries, one hop at a time.
Each country you name must share a land border with the previous one, and the clock gives you 30 seconds per hop. Portugal to China? You'll cross Iberia, Europe, and all of Asia — and the route you pick matters, because only the shortest chain earns the perfect 1000. You can afford five wrong picks a day: each one bounces off without counting as a hop, but it burns a ✗ — and reveals the first letter of the next country on the shortest route from where you stand.
How points work
The game tells you the shortest possible hop count up front — that's your par.
- 🟩 Match the shortest route — the perfect 1000
- 🟨 Every extra hop — costs 150 points
- ❌ Wrong picks and timeouts — five allowed, each reveals a hint
- 🏁 Any finished chain — scores at least 100
- 🏳️ Give up, run out of hops or of wrong picks — 0, and the shortest route is revealed
Land borders only — sea crossings don't count, so island nations are dead ends. Typos can't hurt you: the game only submits names that match a real country from the list.
Border Chain runs on the same country-border data behind MapGO's Distance to Border tool, which measures how far any point on Earth is from the nearest country border. Sign in free to save your score, build a streak, and appear on the daily and all-time leaderboards.