Papua New Guinea outline map — draw the shape from memory
- Difficulty
- hard
- Continent
- Oceania
- Landmasses
- 2
- Outline points
- 114
- Elongation
- 1.42 : 1 (wider than tall)
What makes the Papua New Guinea outline tricky
Papua New Guinea is scored as 2 separate landmasses rather than one closed loop. That changes the task: you have to get each piece roughly right and place them correctly relative to each other. Players routinely draw the main landmass well and then lose points by putting the smaller pieces too close, too far, or on the wrong side.
The outline is close to 1.4:1, so it nearly fills a square. Compact shapes are more forgiving on proportion but less forgiving on the coastline itself, since there is no dominant axis to anchor your first stroke to.
The land fills roughly 37% 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 114 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 Papua New Guinea 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 Papua New Guinea hard to draw from memory?
Few players can place this one from memory. In this game Papua New Guinea is rated hard.
How is my drawing of Papua New Guinea 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 Papua New Guinea outline?
114 points across 2 rings, simplified from Natural Earth 1:50m data.
What counts as a good score on Papua New Guinea?
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 Papua New Guinea?
Only the 2 landmasses in the reference outline are 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.