State Flags Quiz

You get a written description of a state flag and four candidate states. Fifteen flags per game, about ninety seconds, and the skill it builds is reading a flag by its one distinguishing element instead of by its background color.

How to play

A description appears in the navy card. Four state names sit below it. Tap the match.

• The deck holds fifteen flags and all fifteen appear in every game, reshuffled into a new order.
• That means a perfect run proves you know the whole set, not that you drew an easy hand.
• One point per correct tap. Three lives, and a wrong answer reveals the right state before it takes a heart.
• Lose all three hearts and the run stops before the fifteenth flag.
• 14 out of 15 earns three stars, 9 earns two, 5 earns one.
• Result and streak are stored in your browser.

Read the odd element, not the color

Sorting by background color gets you nowhere here, because dark blue dominates the deck. Sort by the feature nothing else carries.

• Ohio is the only flag described by its shape. It is a swallowtail pennant rather than a rectangle.
• Hawaii is the only one carrying a Union Jack, alongside eight horizontal stripes.
• Maryland is the only heraldic pattern, yellow and black quartered against red and white.
• New Mexico is the only flag reduced to a single symbol, the red Zia sun on yellow.
• Alaska is the only constellation, the Big Dipper with the North Star.
• Alabama is the only bare diagonal cross, crimson on plain white with nothing added.

Two animals appear in the deck and they are easy to swap. California's bear walks across a white field beside the words California Republic. Wyoming's bison is white on blue and carries the state seal. If the clue mentions a seal, it is Wyoming.

The single most useful rule in this game concerns New York. Plenty of American state flags are a seal on a dark blue field, but New York is the only one of them in this deck. When a clue offers nothing beyond a state seal on dark blue, the answer is New York every time.

The fifteen flags in the deck

Keep drilling