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Western States Map Quiz

Thirteen states, the largest by area and the emptiest by population — plus the two that are not attached to the rest.

The straight lines are the difficulty

The West is easy where the coast does the work and hard where the surveyors did. Alaska, Hawaii, California and Washington are nearly free. The trouble is the interior block — Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming — where borders follow meridians and parallels rather than anything visible on the ground. Colorado and Wyoming are the two states bounded entirely by straight lines, Colorado the wider one to the south; Utah is the one with a rectangular bite taken out of its northeast corner, where Wyoming pushes in.

Anchor on the Four Corners

Every interior Western state can be placed from the single point where Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico meet — the only spot in the country where four states touch. Fix that corner and the four states rotate around it in a fixed pattern: Utah northwest, Colorado northeast, Arizona southwest, New Mexico southeast. Nevada is the wedge west of Utah with the diagonal southern border, Idaho is the one with the northern panhandle, and Montana caps the column along the Canadian line. The West region page covers all 13 states, and the Mountain and Pacific pages split them as the Census does.

Scale is deceptive out here

Four of the five largest states in the country are in this deck — Alaska, California, Montana and New Mexico, with only Texas breaking the run at second place — so the clicking targets are generous and the mistakes are almost never near-misses — a wrong answer here means the wrong state entirely, not a slipped cursor. It is also the region where a national map flattens real distances: Alaska is drawn as an inset at a fraction of its true size, and Hawaii sits roughly 2,400 miles from the mainland rather than just off California. The Alaska and Hawaii pages show each at its own scale.

Try another deck

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 easiest-states deck for fifteen outlines you can spot on sight; the hardest-states deck for the twenty that decide your score; and one region at a time — Northeast, Midwest, South.