Endless US State Shape Quiz

US state outlines on a loop, shuffled so you cover the whole map.

Endless deals from all 50 US states, and a full pass meets every one of them. 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.

Endless draws from a shuffled bag, so you meet every one of the 50 answers before any repeats. At one a day the daily would take 50 days to cover the same ground, roughly 1.6 months. Endless does it in a sitting, which makes it the mode to drill in and the fastest way to turn the half of the pool you are guessing at into the half you know.

Endless has no schedule and no streak, so you can spend guesses testing a hunch. Nothing is recorded against a date, so a bad run costs nothing. The board reshuffles as soon as you finish one, and the bag carries on from where it was, so a long session keeps covering new US state shapes. Full rules, including how the distance and compass hints are calculated, are on the how-to-play page, and today's single scheduled puzzle is on the daily board.