Gambia outline map — draw the shape from memory
- Difficulty
- hard
- Continent
- Africa
- Landmasses
- 1
- Outline points
- 71
- Elongation
- 3.90 : 1 (wider than tall)
What makes the Gambia outline tricky
The outline is about 3.9 times longer than it is wide. Elongated shapes are consistently drawn too stubby, because people start at one end, run out of canvas, and compress the rest. Setting the two extreme ends down first, then filling in between, avoids most of that error.
The land fills roughly 38% of its bounding box, which is on the solid side. The overall mass matters more than fine coastal detail — getting the silhouette proportions right will do more for your score than chasing small inlets.
The reference outline holds 71 points, simplified from Natural Earth 1:50m data. That is enough to keep the recognizable features while dropping detail no one could draw freehand in 30 seconds, so you are never penalised for missing a coastline wiggle that is invisible at this scale.
How to draw Gambia more accurately
- Sketch the overall bounding shape first, lightly, before committing to any coastline. Proportion errors cost far more than wobbly lines.
- Anchor the extremes: mark the northernmost, southernmost, easternmost and westernmost points, then join them. This is the single biggest improvement most players make.
- Draw at a comfortable size anywhere on the canvas. Position and scale are normalised away before scoring, so there is no advantage to filling the frame edge to edge.
- Do not rotate the shape to make it easier to draw. Orientation is part of the answer and is not normalised away.
Questions
Is Gambia hard to draw from memory?
Few players can place this one from memory. In this game Gambia is rated hard.
How is my drawing of Gambia scored?
Your line is compared to the real border in both directions — how far your stroke sits from the true coast, and how much of the true coast you missed. Position and size are ignored; shape, proportion and orientation are not.
How many points make up the Gambia outline?
71 points across 1 ring, simplified from Natural Earth 1:50m data.
What counts as a good score on Gambia?
Anything above 70 means the shape was clearly right — that is roughly a 2% average deviation from the true border. 50 to 70 is recognisable with proportion errors. Below 30 usually means the orientation or the aspect ratio was wrong rather than the linework.
Do I have to include every island of Gambia?
Only the 1 landmass in the reference outline is scored. Small offshore islands and distant overseas territories are excluded, because including them would shrink the main landmass to an unusable size on the canvas.