Real Flag, Fake Flag is a daily puzzle. Each edition shows seven flags, one at a time, and asks a single question about each: is this a flag somebody actually uses, or was it invented for this game? You answer, you find out immediately, and you read a short note about what you were looking at.
More than countries. A flag counts as real if it is documented in use by a real body: countries and their historical predecessors, cities, provinces and regions, Indigenous nations, communities, movements, religious and naval ensigns, and organisations. An unfamiliar flag is not the same as a false one, and most of the difficulty in this game comes from that gap.
Proposals and fictional designs are their own thing. A design that was only ever proposed sits outside the question and is kept out of the published game; a design published as deliberately fictional can appear as a fake, and its explanation says so.
Every fake is made for this game by editing a real flag's vector source — rearranging bands, moving or replacing an emblem, changing a field colour — and then reviewed by hand. A candidate is checked against the whole collection before it can be published, so a “fake” that turns out to be a real flag somewhere is rejected rather than shipped. No similarity score can prove that a design exists nowhere on earth, and nothing here claims otherwise.
Each date is assembled from the reviewed pool under fixed rules: roughly balanced real and fake, at least five categories, no category more than twice, at least three regions, an easy opening, a harder finish, and a one-year cooldown so the same flag does not come round again. A date is frozen when it is published — the images are copied and locked, so an old edition plays exactly as it did on the day.
Flag artwork comes mostly from Wikimedia Commons and other openly licensed sources. Each round carries its source link and, where the licence asks for it, its attribution — both shown after you answer, so the credit does not give the answer away. If a credit is wrong, or an image should not be here, tell me and it goes.
This is a game, not a reference work. Flags are contested, revised and retired, and a short explanation cannot carry every caveat. If a round is wrong, say so — corrections are worth more than a streak.
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