Capital City Chain Quiz: Link Capitals by Their Last Letter

Capital Chain is a word game built on world capitals. Name any capital to start, then keep the chain alive: each new capital must begin with the last letter of the one before it — Lisbon → Nairobi → Islamabad.

Your score is simply how long your chain gets. The quiz sets no target to beat: it scores you against the longest chain the dataset can build at all, which is 70 links. Nobody reaches that by accident; long runs are about rationing your rare letters.

You can also play the chain on one continent. Asia, Europe and Africa each have their own, much shorter ceiling — 17, 14 and 9 links — so a continent run is a tight puzzle rather than a marathon.

How to play

• Your first capital can be anything. After that, each capital must start with the final letter of the previous one, based on the capital's canonical spelling.
• Each country can be used only once per run.
• Typing stays lenient — small typos and accepted alternate spellings still land — but a guess that doesn't fit the required letter is silently ignored, so experimenting costs you nothing.
• The run ends at a dead end (no unused capital starts with the required letter) or when you give up. The end screen tells you which it was — and after a give-up, it lists capitals you could still have played.
• There is no pass mark. The score bar shows your chain against the longest chain that exists, so 20 links on the world map reads as 20 out of 70.

What counts in this quiz

• The pool is all 197 capitals — one canonical capital per country, microstates included. Vaduz, Valletta, or San Marino can each save a chain.
• Only a capital's primary spelling drives the chain — alternates help you type it, but the next required letter always comes from the canonical name.

What's not included — and why

• Nothing is excluded — every country in the world dataset has exactly one canonical capital in the pool.

Good to know

• The longest chain that can actually be built from this capital set is 70 links — computed offline over the first-letter-to-last-letter graph of all 197 capitals.
• A huge share of the world's capitals end in the letter A, so capitals that start with A become the currency of a long run — spend them carefully.
• Chain strategy inverts normal capitals knowledge: an obscure capital with a rare first letter is worth far more here than a famous one.