States Quiz Duel

How to play States Quiz Duel

1. Choose the states before you start: All 50, or one region: Northeast, Midwest, South or West.
2. Choose the game: Name it, where a state lights up and you pick its name, or Find it, where you see a name and tap the state on the map.
3. Each player has a pad in their own colour, with a map of their own. On a phone held upright, Orange's pad is at the bottom and Purple's is at the top, facing the other player, so both maps are the right way up for the player looking at them. On a wide screen the pads sit side by side.
4. In Name it, a state lights up yellow on both maps at once. Tap its name from the four answers on your pad. Small states, such as Rhode Island and Delaware, also get a yellow ring around them when they're tiny on your screen, so you can't miss them.
5. The first right answer wins the point. The bar between the pads shows the time left: 12 seconds for each state, or 15 in Find it.
6. A wrong answer locks you out until the next state, and your rival gets the chance to answer. If nobody gets it right in time, nobody scores.
7. Learn as you go. After every state, both maps show the answer in green, and your pad says which state it was: "That's Ohio".
8. The first player to 7 points wins the round. No state comes up twice until every state you chose has come up once.

Find it: tap the state on the map

In Find it, the state's name appears above your map and you race to tap that state. A tap well inside a state picks it straight away. A tap near a border, or on one of the small states in the Northeast, first zooms your map in around the spot you tapped, so you can tap exactly the state you mean; tap the magnifier in the corner to see the whole map again. A wrong tap locks you out, and the state you tapped turns red so you can see where you went.

Find it is the harder game: there are no answers to choose from, so you have to know where every state is. It works best with a finger or a mouse, so it has no keys.

Which states?

The four regions are the ones the US Census Bureau uses. When you pick a region, the map shows just that region, with the states around it in grey. The Northeast, Midwest and South are drawn bigger, so even their small states are easy to see.

The wrong answers are never picked at random from the whole country. They're usually the state's neighbours, and often a look-alike: North Dakota for South Dakota, Vermont for New Hampshire, Wyoming for Colorado, or Kansas for Arkansas, whose names look alike. To get the point you have to really know the state, not just roughly where it is.

The map

The map is drawn from the US Census Bureau's outlines of the states. As on many maps of the United States, Alaska and Hawaii sit in the lower left corner rather than where they really are, and Alaska is drawn at a smaller scale than the rest: it's by far the biggest state, more than twice the size of Texas. Washington, D.C., the nation's capital, is not a state, so it never comes up. It's the tiny grey shape between Maryland and Virginia.

Controls

The keys follow the answer buttons in reading order: top left, top right, bottom left, bottom right, or top to bottom when the answers sit in a column beside the map, as they do on a small or sideways screen. On a computer, each button shows its key. 1 to 4 on the number pad work for Orange too, and against the computer either set of keys works for you. The answers are always in alphabetical order.

Computer levels

The computer sees each state at the same moment you do. Like a person, it knows some states and not others. When it knows one, it answers quickly. When it doesn't, it takes longer and has to guess, and a look-alike often fools it. Small states and look-alikes take it longer at every level. It never knows which answer you're about to tap.

In Find it, every level takes a little longer, and when it doesn't know a state it usually taps a neighbour or a look-alike, the way people do.

Tips to win

• Learn the famous shapes first. Michigan's mitten, Florida's long peninsula, Louisiana's boot and the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas are easy points once you know them.
• Use the neighbours. North Dakota is above South Dakota, Nebraska is above Kansas, Wyoming is above Colorado, and Mississippi is to the left of Alabama. If you know one of a pair, you know the other.
• Tell Vermont from New Hampshire. They look like two triangles side by side. Vermont, on the left, is wide at the top and narrow at the bottom; New Hampshire, on the right, is narrow at the top and wide at the bottom.
• Watch the small states. Rhode Island is the smallest state of all, then Delaware, then Connecticut. In the All 50 quiz a ring shows you where a small state is; in the Northeast quiz they're big enough to see clearly.
• Don't guess too early. A wrong tap locks you out and gives your rival a free run at the point. If you're not sure, a second look often helps.
• Learn a region at a time. Play the West or the South until you know every state in it, then move on.

Good for the classroom

A quick race is a fun way to learn a map that would otherwise be a list to learn by heart. Pairs of pupils can share one tablet, each with their own pad and their own map, and the answer shown after every state means both players learn something, whoever wins the point. The Easy computer gives a beginner time to think, the regions let a class learn the country one part at a time, and Find it is a good test once the names come easily.

Once you know where the states are, try Capitals Duel to race for their capitals, or Flag Quiz Duel for the flags of the world.

Questions

Updated 11 November 2026