Daily US State Shape Quiz

Today's mystery US state outline, the same one for every player until local midnight.

Today's answer is drawn from all 50 US states. 45 of them draw as a single unbroken landmass, which means the outline gives you one closed edge and nothing else; zero are scattered enough that the arrangement of the pieces is the clue. The most compact outline in the set is Wyoming, smooth, rounded and genuinely hard, because a shape with no corners looks like a dozen others. The most convoluted is Alaska, which almost identifies itself. Between Alaska and Rhode Island the pool spans several orders of magnitude of area, and the puzzle scales every outline to the same box, so size is exactly the cue you don't get.

One state outline from the fifty. The rectangular ones out west are a coin flip until you learn their proportions; the coastal ones give you a silhouette to work with. You get 6 guesses. Every wrong one returns the great-circle distance to the target, a compass direction pointing at it and a proximity percentage, so a cold start is recoverable, two well-spaced wrong guesses will usually bracket the answer.

One US state shape a day, on a fixed schedule, means the pool turns over slowly: 50 answers is 50 days before today's could come round again, roughly 1.6 months. The slowness is the point. There is one attempt, the result stands, and a streak is worth something precisely because it cannot be re-rolled. It also means the daily is a poor way to learn the pool and a good way to find out whether you already have.

Every player anywhere gets the same US state shape on the same date, rotating at your local midnight, so everyone's results compare directly. Six guesses, then the answer, then a share card recording how many it took. Progress and streaks live on your own device, so clearing site data clears them. Full rules, including how the distance and compass hints are calculated, are on the how-to-play page. If you've already played today, endless mode has no limit.