Welcome to Gaia! ::

The War of the World is a battle between countries to decide which country has the best flag.

The countries will be split into 20 groups of 10 with the top 3 flags in each group advancing to the next round. Each round will last for 1 month once the voting begins.

To get 200 countries I took the 194 officially recognized countries of the world, split the UK into it's 4 member countries to get 197 and added Kosovo, Palestine and Taiwan, because their soverignty is recognized by a significant number of nations, to get an even 200.

To make the groups I typed all of the countries in alphabetical order into random.org. I then took this randomized list and seeded them in order into the 20 groups and arranged each group in alphabetical order. The end result are the 20 groups you see.

Do you mind if we/I use this as a discussion thread and talk about our flag opinions here, or would it be best to do that somewhere else?

Noted! Since it's here, may as well use this thread.

So I'm actually pretty impressed by how consistently pretty a lot of the central Asian countries' flags are. Ended up voting for a lot of them as a result.

There were definitely some groups for which I wanted to vote for more than one flag.
Also I gave up on voting on aesthetics/design/recognizability early on, because voting for the most badass design is more fun. I love the flags with suns/birds/dragons/temples on them so much.

So now that I have real wifi again thanks to the technician guy fixing things today, question: When's the next round of voting start up again? Combing through the results was neat.

No rush, friend! I'm just glad to see you around again. smile