Easiest States to Find on a Map

Fifteen states with outlines you can recognize on sight — the deck to start with, and the one to rebuild confidence on.

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What makes a state easy

Three things: a distinctive silhouette, a position on an edge of the country, and a size big enough to click without zooming. Texas, Florida, Michigan, Louisiana and Oklahoma win on shape — a panhandle, a peninsula, two peninsulas, a boot, a pan. Maine, California, Washington, Minnesota and New York win on position: each occupies a corner or an edge nothing else can occupy. Alaska and Hawaii are not attached to anything, which makes them the two most reliable clicks in the game.

The three interior states in this deck

Nevada, Utah and Idaho are the odd ones out here — no ocean coast to place them against, and in Nevada's and Utah's case no foreign border either — but each has a shape nothing else in the West resembles: Nevada's long diagonal southern line, Utah's notched northeast corner where Wyoming pushes in, and Idaho's tall panhandle running north until it reaches Canada. Get comfortable with those three and the rest of the interior West stops being a blur of rectangles.

Use the easy states as anchors

The point of this deck is not the fifteen states in it — it is that each one fixes a piece of the map you can then measure from. Once Texas, California, Florida and Minnesota are placed, the states between them are constrained: Oklahoma has to sit on top of Texas, Arizona and Nevada have to sit east of California, and Iowa and Wisconsin have to sit below and beside Minnesota. Players who score badly on the full quiz usually know these fifteen already and have never used them as reference points. When this deck starts feeling automatic, move to the hardest-states deck or the full 50-state quiz, and keep a blank US map handy to fill in by hand between rounds.

Where to go from here

Every deck on the site scores as you answer and reshuffles on reload. There is the full 50-state map quiz for all 50 in one round; the capitals quiz for multiple choice on every state capital; the abbreviations quiz for the two-letter postal codes; the hardest-states deck for the twenty that decide your score; and one region at a time — Northeast, Midwest, South, West.