North America Map Quiz

How the quiz plays, and how to work through it

Every round asks for one thing: a click on the named country. There is nothing written on the map to read off, so recognition has to come from the shape of the territory and its position relative to everything around it. A correct first click locks the country in and scores; a wrong click counts as a miss, and after two misses the quiz reveals where the country actually was. That last behaviour matters more than it sounds, because it means a round you fail still ends with the correct answer on the screen rather than with a blank.

Scale is the awkward part of a continent that contains both Canada and Saint Kitts and Nevis. At a zoom level wide enough to fit Greenland and Panama on the same screen, a 261 square kilometre federation is physically smaller than a cursor tip. The quiz handles this by drawing the smallest island states as enlarged clickable dots placed at their true positions, while the mainland countries and the larger islands keep their real outlines. The dots are a concession to arithmetic rather than a hint: they are sized to stay reachable, not to scale, so they tell you nothing about how big each island really is.

There is a sensible order in which to learn the set, even though the prompts arrive shuffled. Fix the three mainland countries first, because they anchor everything else on the map. Then treat Central America as a sequence rather than as seven separate facts: Guatemala and Belize sit against Mexico, Honduras and El Salvador share the middle, Nicaragua is the broad one, and Costa Rica and Panama close the isthmus. Take the islands in two passes after that: the five large western targets of Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas, and then the eastern arc from Saint Kitts and Nevis down to Trinidad and Tobago.

Nothing here needs an account. The quiz runs in a web browser on a phone, tablet or desktop, it is free, and the only thing it remembers is the best score achieved on that particular device; clearing the browser's storage clears it. Because there is no sign-in and no penalty for replaying, the productive way to use it is repetition. Play once, note which countries the reveal had to show you, read the relevant section below, and play again.

Why the count is 23, and what the map deliberately leaves out

Twenty-three is the number of sovereign states in North America, meaning countries that are members of the United Nations in their own right. They fall into three groups: the three large mainland countries of Canada, the United States and Mexico; the seven countries of Central America; and thirteen island states in and around the Caribbean. Three plus seven plus thirteen is where the total comes from, and it is worth memorising in that shape.

A good many well-known places on the same map are not targets, and clicking them is always a miss. Greenland is the largest of them: geographically North American, physically enormous, and an autonomous territory within the Kingdom of Denmark rather than an independent state. Puerto Rico and the United States Virgin Islands are American territories. Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the British Virgin Islands, Anguilla and Montserrat are British Overseas Territories. Guadeloupe, Martinique, Saint-Martin and Saint-Barthelemy are French. Aruba, Curacao and Sint Maarten are constituent countries within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, self-governing but not separately sovereign.

Two of the 23 sit awkwardly in other classification schemes, which is why other sources sometimes give other totals. The United Nations geoscheme files Mexico under Central America rather than treating it as the region's northern neighbour, so population tables headed Central America can look several times larger than expected. Trinidad and Tobago, at the far end of the chain, lies on the South American continental shelf about eleven kilometres off the Venezuelan coast and is grouped with the Caribbean for political and cultural reasons rather than geological ones.

The count also surprises people because school geography often stops at three: Canada, the United States and Mexico are the countries most atlases bother to label at continental zoom. In practice more than four fifths of North America's countries lie south of the Rio Grande or offshore, and most are small enough that the only way to place them is to have looked at them deliberately at least once. That is the gap this quiz is built to close.

The mainland three and the borders between them

Canada is the second-largest country in the world by area and fills most of the map's northern half, which makes it the easiest single click in the set. Its capital is the harder fact, because people reasonably assume that capitals are the biggest cities. Ottawa was chosen in 1857, when Queen Victoria settled a long-running argument between Kingston, Toronto, Montreal and Quebec City by picking a modest lumber town on the boundary between Upper and Lower Canada, far enough from the American frontier to be defensible and small enough to be politically inoffensive. Ottawa is Canada's fourth-largest city by population.

The United States is the only mainland country in the quiz that appears in two separate blocks: the contiguous states, and Alaska in the far north-west, cut off from the rest by British Columbia and the Yukon. Its capital, Washington, D.C., lies in no state at all, the District of Columbia having been created as a federal district for the purpose. The Canada-United States border runs 8,891 kilometres and is drawn in a way that produces genuine oddities, among them Point Roberts in Washington state and the Northwest Angle in Minnesota, both of them American land reachable overland only by driving through Canada.

Mexico's formal name is the United Mexican States, and it comprises 31 states plus Mexico City. The capital sits high in the Valley of Mexico on the drained bed of Lake Texcoco, and it is slowly sinking as the aquifer beneath it is drawn down; parts of the historic centre have dropped several metres over the past century. On the map, Mexico's giveaways are the long finger of the Baja California peninsula on the Pacific side and the blunt Yucatan peninsula pushing north into the Gulf of Mexico.

The mainland tells are simple once stated. Baja California is Mexican: it is neither a separate country nor part of the United States, and the Gulf of California that separates it from the mainland is Mexican water. Alaska is American, despite being hemmed in on its landward side by Canada. And Mexico's southern border touches two countries rather than one, Guatemala and Belize. That last detail is the fastest route into placing Belize, which is otherwise the country players most often click straight past on their way down the isthmus.

Central America: seven countries along a bending isthmus

Central America runs roughly 1,900 kilometres from the Mexican border to Colombia, and the seven countries fill it in an approximate north-to-south order: Guatemala and Belize at the top, Honduras and El Salvador beneath them, then Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama. The single most useful structural fact is that the isthmus does not run north to south all the way down. It bends sharply eastwards from about Nicaragua onwards, so Panama lies almost due east of Costa Rica, its Caribbean coast faces north and its Pacific coast faces south. Players who expect a straight ladder consistently click one country too far north.

Belize is the smallest of the seven by population and the only one with English as its official language, a legacy of its long spell as British Honduras. It is also the only Central American country with no Pacific coastline. Its capital, Belmopan, is an invented city: after Hurricane Hattie destroyed most of low-lying Belize City in 1961, the government laid out a new administrative capital about 80 kilometres inland and moved the seat of government there in 1970. Belmopan is the smallest capital city in the continental Americas by population, and Belize City remains the country's largest settlement.

The shape of Belize is also the subject of the region's most persistent territorial dispute. Guatemala has long claimed a substantial share of Belizean territory; in the formulation it adopted in 1999, the land between the Sibun and Sarstoon rivers, amounting to roughly half of Belize. Both countries put the question to referendums, Guatemala in 2018 and Belize in 2019, and both voted to send the matter to the International Court of Justice in The Hague, where it has been proceeding since 2019.

El Salvador is the smallest of the seven by area, at 21,041 square kilometres, and the only one with no Caribbean coast whatsoever: Honduras wraps above and around it, taking the Caribbean frontage. Nicaragua is the largest by area and holds Lake Nicaragua, the biggest lake in Central America. Managua became its capital in 1852 as a deliberate compromise between the rival cities of Leon and Granada, neither of which would accept the other's claim. An earthquake destroyed most of Managua's downtown in December 1972, and the old centre was never rebuilt in the form it had before, which is why the city has no conventional core.

Costa Rica abolished its army on 1 December 1948 and wrote the abolition into Article 12 of its 1949 constitution, redirecting the military budget towards health and education. Panama was a province of Colombia until 1903, when it separated with American backing and a canal treaty followed within weeks. The canal supplies the most reliable trick answer in the region. Because the isthmus bends, a ship transiting from the Atlantic to the Pacific travels south-eastwards and emerges on the Pacific side to the east of where it entered.

Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica and the Bahamas

Cuba is the largest country in the Caribbean by area, at about 110,860 square kilometres, and its long narrow outline running west-north-west to east-south-east is the most recognisable island shape on the map. It is not the most populous Caribbean country, however: Haiti and the Dominican Republic, sharing a smaller island between them, each hold more people than Cuba does. Havana lies near the western end, facing the Straits of Florida, and Cuba's northern coast is only around 150 kilometres from Key West.

Hispaniola, the second-largest Caribbean island, carries two countries. Haiti occupies the western third, with Port-au-Prince at the head of the Gulf of Gonave; the Dominican Republic takes the eastern two-thirds, with Santo Domingo on the south coast. It is the only Caribbean island divided between two sovereign states of its own. The one comparable case, Saint Martin, is split between a French overseas collectivity and a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands rather than between two states based on the island itself. Haiti declared independence on 1 January 1804, following a slave revolt that is one of the only rebellions known to history to have founded a state ruled by former captives.

The tell for this pair is orientation and outline rather than size. Haiti is the western of the two, and its shape is the distinctive one: two long peninsulas reaching west like open pincers around the Gulf of Gonave. The Dominican Republic is the solid eastern block with the smoother, blunter coastline. If the territory offered shows a deep bite taken out of its western side, it is Haiti; if it looks like a single unbroken mass with its long axis running east to west, it is the Dominican Republic.

Jamaica lies south of Cuba and west of Hispaniola, alone in that stretch of sea, which makes it one of the easier island clicks once its position is fixed rather than guessed. It is the third-largest island in the Caribbean, its capital is Kingston on the south-eastern coast, and it became independent from the United Kingdom in 1962. The common error is to place it too far east, in the gap between Hispaniola and Puerto Rico, where there is no island at all.

The Bahamas is the outlier of this group in a way that catches people out: it is not in the Caribbean Sea. The archipelago lies in the Atlantic Ocean north-east of Cuba, in the Lucayan Archipelago, and belongs to the wider Caribbean region politically and culturally rather than geographically. It consists of around 700 islands and some 2,400 cays, roughly 30 of them inhabited. Nassau, the capital, is on New Providence, which is not the largest island in the chain; Andros is considerably bigger. Because the country is a scatter rather than a single landmass, the click should go to the middle of the spread.

The Lesser Antilles, where the score is decided

The eastern Caribbean is a curved chain running from the Virgin Islands south to Trinidad, and the quiz's targets on it come in a fixed order worth learning as a sequence: Saint Kitts and Nevis, Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Grenada, with Barbados set well out to the east of the chain and Trinidad and Tobago closing it at the southern end. Most of the arc is volcanic, raised where the South American plate descends beneath the Caribbean plate, and several of these islands still carry active volcanoes.

Saint Kitts and Nevis, near the northern end of the run, is the smallest sovereign state in the Western Hemisphere in both area and population, at 261 square kilometres and roughly 54,000 people. Anguilla was originally part of the union, known as Saint Christopher-Nevis-Anguilla, but seceded in 1967 and remains a British Overseas Territory; the federation became independent in 1983. Close by, Antigua and Barbuda covers two main islands plus the uninhabited rock of Redonda. Hurricane Irma damaged or destroyed about 95 per cent of Barbuda's buildings in September 2017, and almost the entire population, some 1,800 people, was evacuated to Antigua.

Dominica is the island most often confused with the Dominican Republic, and the two are nothing like each other. The Dominican Republic is a large Greater Antillean country on Hispaniola; Dominica is a 750 square kilometre island in the middle of the Lesser Antilles, several hundred kilometres to the south-east. The tell is its neighbours: Dominica sits directly between Guadeloupe to the north and Martinique to the south, both French overseas departments and neither of them a quiz target. Its capital is Roseau, its interior holds Morne Trois Pitons National Park and the Boiling Lake, and it is the one Eastern Caribbean state with a surviving Kalinago community, settled on a territory along its east coast.

Saint Lucia and Saint Vincent are the next confusion, and here the tell is shape rather than position alone. Saint Lucia is the northern of the two and a single compact island, capital Castries, marked by the twin volcanic plugs of the Pitons; England and France fought over it fourteen times, which earned it the nickname Helen of the West. Saint Vincent lies to the south and trails a tail of small islands behind it, the Grenadines, a chain of about 32 in total. Only the northern two-thirds of that chain belongs to Saint Vincent. The southern third, including Carriacou and Petite Martinique, belongs to Grenada, which lies further south again with its capital at Saint George's. If the target has a string of small islands hanging below it, it is Saint Vincent and the Grenadines.

The final two targets sit off the chain rather than on it, and that is exactly why they are missed. Barbados lies about 168 kilometres east of Saint Lucia and Saint Vincent, out in the Atlantic, and it is geologically unlike its neighbours: coral limestone lifted from the sea floor rather than a volcano, which is why it is low and rolling where they are steep. It removed the British monarch as head of state and became a republic on 30 November 2021, the fifty-fifth anniversary of its independence. Trinidad and Tobago closes the set about eleven kilometres off the Venezuelan coast, on the South American continental shelf, with its capital at Port of Spain. Clicking too far north on either of these is the commonest way to drop the last point of a run.