Rivers & Mountains

Landmark to state, four candidates per prompt. Fifteen rounds pulled from a deck of thirty seven rivers, ranges, canyons, deltas and volcanoes, so a game runs about ninety seconds and no two draws are alike. It trains physical geography rather than borders and capitals.

How to play

A landmark appears under "In which state is this landmark". Four state names sit below. Tap the right one.

• Fifteen rounds per game, sampled without repeats from the thirty seven landmark prompts.
• One point per correct tap. Three lives, and a miss shows the correct state before taking a heart.
• Lose all three hearts and the run ends before round fifteen.
• 14 out of 15 earns three stars, 9 earns two, 5 earns one.
• Shared features always carry a qualifier in the prompt, so read the whole line before answering.
• Best score and daily streak are saved in your browser.

Six prompts say Mississippi and no two share an answer

This is the single biggest source of lost hearts. The river runs along or through ten states, and the deck uses it six different ways. Ignore the word Mississippi and read only the qualifier attached to it.

The other repeated features and how to split them

• Badlands appears twice. With the Missouri River it is North Dakota. With Mount Rushmore it is South Dakota. Rushmore is the tiebreaker.
• The Cascades appear twice. Mount Rainier is Washington, Mount Hood is Oregon.
• Five Appalachian prompts. The Great Smoky Mountains are Tennessee, Shenandoah and the Blue Ridge are Virginia, Mount Mitchell is North Carolina, the unqualified Appalachian Mountains entry is West Virginia, and Mount Katahdin, the northern end of the Appalachian Trail, is Maine.
• New England splits by color. The Green Mountains are Vermont, the White Mountains are New Hampshire.
• Three summit prompts. Denali is Alaska, Mount Whitney with the Sierra Nevada is California, Mauna Kea is Hawaii.
• Two Great Lakes prompts. Four of the five lakes touch Michigan, while the Door Peninsula on Lake Michigan is Wisconsin.

Everything left over is a one of a kind landmark and should be free points: the Grand Canyon for Arizona, Yellowstone and the Tetons for Wyoming, Glacier National Park for Montana, the Everglades for Florida, the Ozarks for Arkansas, Carlsbad Caverns for New Mexico, the Rio Grande for Texas, the Great Salt Lake for Utah, and the Snake River with the Sawtooth Range for Idaho.

Keep drilling