Flag emoji for quiz rounds and geography games, limited to the ones that actually render on iOS, Android and Windows rather than showing letter pairs.
There is no single flag character in Unicode. A flag emoji is a pair of regional indicator symbols, letters A to Z in a special block, and the renderer is what turns the pair into a flag. Send the pair for France to a device that does not support flag rendering and the reader sees the letters F and R side by side rather than a flag. This is why flags fail on Windows in most browsers while working perfectly on phones, and why a flag can appear to vanish when text moves between platforms.
The draw is restricted to 43 flags that render reliably across current platforms. Including every valid regional indicator pair would produce a lot of results that show as letter pairs for a large share of readers, which makes the tool look broken when the problem is platform support. For quizzes and geography games the smaller set is not a real limitation, since those rounds work better with widely recognisable countries anyway. If you need a flag for a specific country not in the draw, the emoji picker on your device is the better route.
Because Windows does not render flag emoji in most browsers. The characters are correct. A flag is a pair of regional indicator letters and the renderer draws it.
They are the ones that render reliably across current platforms. Including every valid pair would produce results many readers would see as letter pairs.
Yes, the characters travel intact. Whether it displays as a flag depends entirely on the platform showing it.