Capital Cannon Game

Meteors fall toward the ground, and each one carries the name of a country. One launcher stands below, over six chambers that each hold a rocket and a capital city. Tap the chamber with the capital of the meteor you are aiming at, and its rocket is loaded and fired. The capitals change chambers every wave, so you learn the capital and not the button. It is Missile Command for geography.

How to play

1. Choose a region: the whole world, Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe or Oceania.
2. Each wave puts six capitals in the chambers. You have 2.5 seconds to read them before the first meteor appears.
3. The lowest meteor is the target, with a ring round it. Tap another meteor to aim at it instead.
4. Tap the chamber that holds the capital of the target's country. Its rocket is loaded and fired, and the right one destroys the meteor.
5. A wrong capital fizzles. The meteor drops a step, that chamber jams for a moment and says Jammed, and the right capital shows under the meteor.

A wave has more meteors than chambers, 7 in the first wave and up to 12 later, so a country falls more than once and no chamber can be ruled out. A meteor takes 14 seconds to reach the ground in the first wave and a little less in each wave after it, down to 7 seconds. Countries you got wrong, or that landed, come back in a later wave with the capitals in new places.

When the game ends, the game over screen lists every country you got wrong or that landed, with its capital and the capital you picked instead, so you can go over them before you play again.

You have three shields, and a meteor that reaches the ground costs one. On a keyboard, press 1 to 6 for the chambers as they are numbered, and the left and right arrows to change the target. Escape or Space pauses.

Scoring

The sooner you know the capital, the more a meteor is worth.

• A meteor destroyed with no wrong shot scores 100, plus up to 100 more for how high it still is.
• A meteor destroyed after a wrong shot showed its capital scores 20.
• A wave with no wrong shot and no landing adds 250.

Your five best scores for each region are saved in this browser, with the wave each game reached. In practice, a meteor that lands costs no shield, so the game goes on until you end it from the pause screen. Practice games are not saved.

Which countries are in the game

The game uses 170 countries, the same list as our countries and capitals matching game. A country is left out when its capital is in question, such as one with more than one capital or one whose capital moved recently, so every answer in the game is one you can rely on. Regions follow the United Nations grouping, which puts Russia in Europe and Turkey in Asia.

How to remember the capitals

Link each country to its capital with a mental image. For Australia and Canberra, you might picture a kangaroo opening a can of berries. The stranger the picture, the easier it is to recall when the meteor is falling. The capitals listed on the game over screen are the ones worth making an image for first. See how to create mnemonic images for more ways to build them, and the wiki page on learning geography for more examples.

Try our other free memory games, such as Prime Factor Cannon for arithmetic or Palace Run for the memory palace.