US Map / US Map Quiz / Hardest States

Hardest States to Find on a Map

Twenty states that look like their neighbors or hide behind them — the deck that decides whether you can actually finish a 50-state round.

Cluster one: the small Northeast

New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Delaware and Maryland together cover less ground than Missouri, and on a national map they are targets a few pixels wide. Vermont and New Hampshire are the pair most often swapped: Vermont is the western one, wider at the top, with Lake Champlain on its flank; New Hampshire is the eastern one, wider at the bottom, with a short piece of Atlantic coast. Maryland and Delaware share the Delmarva Peninsula, with Delaware taking the northeast edge of it.

Cluster two: the rectangles

The Plains column — North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas — plus Iowa, Missouri, Wyoming, Montana and Colorado are placed by memorised order, not by outline. North to south on the west side of the column: the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas. Nebraska is the one with a panhandle poking west; Missouri is the one with a bootheel poking south. Wyoming and Colorado are the two rectangles, Wyoming above Colorado, and Montana is the long one on the Canadian border.

Cluster three: the Appalachian middle

West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee lose points because their borders follow rivers and ridges rather than survey lines, so their outlines are irregular in similar ways. Kentucky sits on top of Tennessee, both stretched east to west; West Virginia is the one above Kentucky with a panhandle running northeast between Ohio and Pennsylvania. The blank map is the right study tool for this deck — writing the names into an empty outline fixes them faster than clicking does. The easiest-states deck is the warm-up.

Where to go next

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; and one region at a time — Northeast, Midwest, South, West.