Germany

Germany arrives in the arena with a reputation for precision, and the duels here are exactly the disciplines that reputation rests on: timing, focus and steady hands. Before you challenge a German player, here is an honest picture of the country behind the flag.

What Germany gets right

• Engineering is the national craft: machine tools, cars and industrial robots from Germany run factories on every continent.
• Stretches of the Autobahn still have no general speed limit - unique among major countries, and famously well engineered.
• Public universities charge no tuition in most states, including for international students.
• The Beer Purity Law of 1516 (Reinheitsgebot) is one of the oldest food regulations still in use anywhere.
• The cultural export list is absurdly deep: Bach, Beethoven, Goethe, the printing press and more than twenty thousand castles.

Where Germany struggles

• Bureaucracy is slow and paper-loving; fax machines survived in German offices long after most of the world retired them.
• Digital public services lag well behind the EU average, and card payments still are not accepted everywhere - cash remains king in many places.
• Shops close on Sundays almost everywhere, which surprises most visitors.
• Deutsche Bahn’s punctuality, once a national badge of honour, has become a running national complaint.
• Housing in Munich, Berlin and Hamburg is scarce and expensive, and building new homes is slow.

Think you can out-time a country of engineers? Pick a duel on the home page and take a round off Germany.