Statele

Statele is the United States version of Worldle, from Teuteuf Games, the studio behind Worldle, Travle, WhereTaken and a group of other daily geography games. The shape on screen is drawn in solid black with no labels, and the answer can be any of the 50 states, Washington D.C. or one of the five populated US territories such as Puerto Rico: 56 possible answers in all.

You type a state into the box, pick it from the suggestions and press Guess. A wrong guess fills a row with the distance to the answer, an arrow pointing toward it and a proximity percentage that rises as you get closer. Distances run between the centres of the two states, not their borders, so a neighbour can still show a few hundred kilometres, and the gap hints at the size of the answer. You have six tries.

Solving the main round opens the bonus rounds, chosen from a drop-down menu: Neighbours, Capital, Seal, Flag, Animal, a Quiz, Sports Team, Populous cities, Peaks and Rivers, and Area. Each turns the day's state into a short question, so a single answer becomes a few minutes of learning about one place. Links to the state's Wikipedia page and Google Maps sit under the result, beside a share button.

The answer is picked at random each day, with the rule that a state does not come back within 40 days, so regulars meet each state several times a year. The game is free in the browser with ads; Teuteuf's Passport subscription removes the ads across its games and opens the archive of past puzzles.

Statele suits anyone learning the map of the United States, from students to people who already know Colorado from Wyoming and want to test themselves on Delaware, Guam or the Northern Mariana Islands.