A voice call is a hard place to run a trivia quiz. Nobody can see a map, and a question like "which country is this?" falls flat. The fix is to ask geography trivia questions whose answers are a single spoken name: a canal, a strait, an ocean, a line of latitude. Here are ten that work with no map and no shared screen.
The ten questions, to read aloud
1. Which canal joins the Mediterranean to the Red Sea?
2. Which canal joins the Atlantic to the Pacific?
3. Which strait separates Spain from Morocco?
4. Which strait separates Russia from Alaska?
5. Which line of latitude sits at 23.4 degrees north?
6. Which ocean surrounds Antarctica?
7. Which two countries share the island of Hispaniola?
8. Which country does Greenland belong to?
9. Which is the smallest of the world's oceans?
10. Which large island country lies off the south-east coast of Africa?
The answers, with one line to say afterwards
1. The Suez Canal. In 2021 a huge ship blocked it for six days.
2. The Panama Canal. Ships rise about 26 metres through its locks.
3. The Strait of Gibraltar, about 14 kilometres wide at its narrowest.
4. The Bering Strait, about 82 kilometres wide at its narrowest.
5. The Tropic of Cancer. On the June solstice the sun is directly overhead there.
6. The Southern Ocean, which National Geographic officially recognised in 2021.
7. Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Columbus landed on the island in 1492.
8. Denmark. Greenland is the world's largest island, with fewer than 60,000 people.
9. The Arctic Ocean, much of it covered by sea ice all year.
10. Madagascar. About 90% of its wildlife is found nowhere else.
Why do these work without a picture?
Each question has a name as its answer and a clue that can be said in one breath. There is no "point to it" and no "the one on the left". Water features are also easy for a group to share: most people have a rough idea of where a canal or strait sits, even if they could not draw it.
I kept out flags, landmarks and anything that needs seeing. Those belong in a quiz with pictures.
How hard is the set?
Questions 1, 2 and 10 are the friendly ones. Questions 3, 5, 6 and 8 are medium, since people half know them. Questions 4 and 7 are the hard ones: the strait between Russia and Alaska has a name that is easy to forget, and the Hispaniola question needs two correct names, not one. If your group is mixed in age, ask the easy ones first and save the two hard ones for the end.
How do you run it on a call?
Pick one person to read and mute the others while the question is read. Give ten seconds, then everyone types an answer into the chat at the same time. Reveal together. This stops the fastest talker from deciding for the group.
For a long-distance group, ten questions take about five minutes, which is short enough to slot between catching up and the main event of the evening.
Can you play it as virtual trivia?
Boardit's Trivia Tavern deals the same four-answer question to every phone, so a table of two to eight friends can play online trivia together without typing answers in a chat. Everyone answers every question, and the first right answer scores most. The host picks Geography, or leaves it on Mixed.
You can still keep the call open for chatting while you play. That is how I would run an online trivia game with friends who live far apart.
Where the numbers come from
Every fact above comes from a question in the Boardit bank, each with a reference page, which I re-read on 27 October 2026. Widths and heights are rounded and given as "about".
Ahmed Moaz builds Boardit, a free browser game site.