Draw the US States

Most US geography quizzes ask you to point at a state on a map, which means the map does half the work for you. Drawing is harder and tells you far more. You either know that Louisiana has a boot, that Oklahoma has a panhandle, and that West Virginia is a mess of river borders, or you find out that you don't.

Pick a state, sketch its outline on the blank canvas from memory, and hit submit. The real border then animates over your drawing so you can see exactly where you were right and where you drifted. You get a score out of 100 based on how closely your shape matches the real one.

49 of the 50 states are in the rotation (Hawaii sits out, since a single stroke cannot draw an island chain). Every round is free, there is no sign-up, and you can play as many as you like. If you like this, try Draw the Country for the same game across 82 countries.

Your drawing is compared against the real state boundary in two ways at once. The first measures how much your shape and the real shape overlap once both are scaled to the same size. The second measures how far your line sits from the real border on average, which rescues thin or awkward shapes that the overlap measure treats harshly.

Size and position do not matter. Both shapes are scaled and centred before comparison, so drawing small in a corner costs you nothing. What matters is the shape itself and its proportions. You cannot cheat by stretching a blob, because the width-to-height ratio is locked to the real state.

Orientation does matter, because knowing which way a state points is part of knowing the state. There is a small tolerance of about 15 degrees so a tilted phone doesn't punish you, and using it costs a fraction of a point per degree.