The idea behind this game is to provide an interactive way for people to familiarize themselves with the population distribution within U.S. states. By playing the game you will build up your mental map and be able to answer random trivia questions such as:

• Which states are dominated by a single city or county?
• How many large metro regions are in the state of Missouri?

In addition to "real" states with congressional representation and constitutional citizenship, the territory of Puerto Rico is also included because its population is larger than about 18 U.S. states.

Some states will be easy to guess, others may be a bit more challenging. Click on individual counties for clues or just to add even more detail to your mental map. After submitting your guess, watch the counties morph smoothly back into their true geographic shapes to regain your sanity and find out if you were right.

All cartograms were designed by hand to balance the goals of preserving shape while reducing or enlarging districts according to their population. They feature smooth, simplified boundaries, regular geometric shapes, natural line continuation, and exact shape preservation for disconnected features such as Alaska, Hawaii and Puerto Rico.

Cartograms were constructed manually using "Cartogram Studio" software developed to produce continuous (not blocky) cartograms. The construction process took many hundreds of hours. Animation is coded using the D3 JavaScript library. This page was adapted from USA Population Cartograms with assistance from Claude Sonnet 5 (Anthropic).