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Which countries use the different chevron types?
Which German states build with the A profile, and which with the B?
Can you guess which countries use each of the three guardrail types?
Can you guess which countries use each of the different bollard types?
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Almost every European country marks a pedestrian crossing with the same blue sign, and almost every one of them draws a different crossing on it. The stripes under the walking figure are countable, they are set by a national standard, and they sit on a sign that is bolted to a pole at eye level next to the road. Count them and most of the continent falls away. This page is the full list, and the game drills it.
The sign that warns of, or points out, a place to cross: in most of Europe a
blue square with a white triangle inside it, a figure walking, and under the
figure the crossing itself. It goes by the local name of the crossing, which is
also what people search for (Zebrastreifen in German, passage piéton in
French, paso de cebra in Spanish), and it is put up wherever there is a
crossing to point at, which means towns, villages, school gates and the mouths
of junctions.
What makes it a clue is that nobody agreed on the crossing in the picture. The sign shape is standardised across most of the continent and the drawing inside it is not, so two countries either side of a border can run the same blue square with a different number of stripes on it. The count is national, it changes about as often as a road standard does, which is to say hardly ever, and it is legible from further away than a name on a shopfront.
One corner of Europe marks the crossing instead of signing it. There the stripes on the road are flanked by a beacon, an amber globe on a black and white banded pole standing at each end, and there is no counted crossing on a blue square to read. The game asks about the beacon as one more design, because in a round it does the same job.
The count is the whole clue, so the order is: find a sign you can actually read, then count.
Then the failure modes. A sign too far away to count is worth nothing at all, so resist reading a blur as the count you were hoping for: five is the safe guess and the safe guess is the one that loses rounds. Old signs survive next to new ones, roadworks bring in temporary versions, and a sign that has faded to a pale blue rectangle is telling you about the weather and not the country.
Read it as a lookup table: find the count, and the countries next to it are the answer. Note how uneven the groups are: one count covers more than half the countries here while several cover two or one, which is what makes the rare counts the ones to learn first.
| Count | Where you see it |
|---|---|
| Albania, Croatia, Cyprus, Czechia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Kosovo, Latvia, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, North Macedonia, Norway, Moldova, Portugal, San Marino, Serbia, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey28 countries | |
| Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, France, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Kosovo, Malta, Monaco, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Slovenia, Spain17 countries | |
| Belarus, Estonia, Ireland, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine6 countries | |
| Bulgaria, Hungary, Iceland, Norway, Sweden5 countries | |
| Andorra, Spain2 countries | |
| Czechia, Denmark2 countries | |
| Ireland, United Kingdom2 countries | |
| Liechtenstein, Switzerland2 countries | |
| Spain1 country |
These are the countries where the count alone will catch you out: an older sign still standing beside its replacement, or a second design in service on a different class of road. The game asks about all of them, so a round in one of these countries can be answered by more than one picture.
More than half the countries in the game, which makes this the count that tells you least. Recognising it is still worth something: it is what rules out everything below, so see five and stop looking at signs.
A short count and a coherent set, which is the pair you want. Three stripes narrows a round to a handful of countries in one look, and the alphabet on the next sign along separates them.
Far too many to be anything else, and at that point you are not counting so much as noticing that the crossing is drawn as a solid band of stripes. The only single-country answer in the game.
No sign and no stripes to count: this is the beacon standing at the end of the crossing, and it belongs to two countries that share a border and not much else in their signage. Once you have seen one there is nothing left to work out.
It is the number of stripes drawn on the blue pedestrian crossing sign. The sign is the same shape across most of Europe and the crossing inside it is not, so counting the stripes narrows a round to the countries that use that count. The table on this page lists every count in the game against the countries that use it.
It depends on the country, which is the point. The counts in this game run from none at all up to twelve, with five by far the most common. Anything other than five is worth learning, because the rarer the count the shorter the list of countries it belongs to.
Only one count in the game belongs to a single country. Most of the rest are shared by a handful of neighbours, and the two commonest cover great swathes of the continent between them. That is why the sign is a filter rather than a final answer: read the table on this page as a shortlist generator.
Because they mark the crossing rather than sign it. A zebra crossing there is flanked by beacons, an amber globe on a black and white banded pole, and there is no blue square with a counted crossing on it to read. Ireland also uses signs, so it appears against more than one design in this game.
Rarely on its own. Most counts are shared by several countries and a number of countries use more than one count, so the sign gives you a shortlist. Pair it with bollards, chevrons and guardrails and the list usually closes in a look or two.
Drill them against a map. Reading a list is recognition, and what a round needs is recall under time pressure, which is what the game on this page trains: it shows a count, you click the country, and it tells you what you missed.
The neighbouring clues have games of their own: European Bollards, European Chevrons and European Guardrails.
