State Admission Order

Eight states, one column, arrows on every row. Put them in order of admission to the Union with the oldest at the top. Two minutes per board, and the skill it builds is turning fifty separate dates into six clusters you can actually hold in your head.

How to play

Press Start and eight states are drawn at random from all fifty, listed in scrambled order.

• The up and down arrows move a state one slot at a time. Reorder the whole column before you commit.
• There is one Submit, no lives and no second attempt on the same board.
• Scoring is strict slot matching. You earn a point for every state sitting in exactly the right position, out of eight.
• That makes it unforgiving: a sequence that is correct but shifted by one place scores zero on every displaced row.
• Eight out of eight earns three stars, five earns two, three earns one.
• Best score and daily streak are kept in your browser.

Ties are broken alphabetically

Twenty three of the fifty states share their admission year with at least one other state, so a random draw of eight will often hand you two from the same year. When that happens the board expects them in alphabetical order, and getting it backwards costs two slots rather than one.

• 1787: Delaware, then New Jersey, then Pennsylvania.
• 1788: Connecticut, Georgia, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, South Carolina, Virginia. Eight states in a single year, the largest tie in the game.
• 1845: Florida, then Texas.
• 1889: Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Washington.
• 1890: Idaho, then Wyoming. 1912: Arizona, then New Mexico. 1959: Alaska, then Hawaii.

Two anchors handle the rest. Everything admitted between 1787 and 1790 is one of the thirteen original colonies, and nothing else can outrank them. At the other end, Oklahoma in 1907 is followed by Arizona and New Mexico in 1912, then a gap of 47 years to Alaska and Hawaii in 1959, so those five always sit at the bottom of any board they appear on.

The admission timeline in six blocks

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