Geography games
13 Colonies GeoGuessr
GeoGuessr gives you a photograph and asks where in the world it is. 13-0 does the same thing to one small corner of the world, with a clue instead of a camera and the colonial seaboard instead of Street View. Thirteen colonies, thirteen clicks, thirteen points.
Photographs versus clues
The pleasure of a geography guessing game is the moment the evidence clicks into place: a road sign, a species of tree, the shape of a coastline you have seen a hundred times on a map. GeoGuessr builds that moment out of imagery. 13-0 builds it out of text.
Each round names no colony. It gives you a clue — the King's broad arrow cut into the tallest pines, or a royal charter hidden inside a hollow oak, or a colony that began as a Swedish trading post — and puts a map in front of you. Your job is to turn the clue into a place. The map has no place names on it, only a graticule and the shapes of the coast, so the clue is the whole of your information.
What the two have in common is the shape of the decision. You are never certain. You commit anyway, and then you find out how close you were — except that here, "close" has a precise meaning, which the next section explains.
Why these thirteen are unusually hard
Most geography games give you a lot of world to work with. The thirteen colonies are a strip of coast about 1,600 km long, and four of them — New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut — are packed into the northern 300 km of it. On the game's map the entire New England group occupies less space than Virginia.
The distances are punishing. Trenton, the colonial capital of New Jersey, is roughly 90 km from Dover; Philadelphia is about 45 km from Trenton. And Delaware's border with Maryland runs for kilometres across open water in the head of Delaware Bay — the two colonies are about five kilometres apart at the closest point, which is why "near Delaware" and "in Maryland" are almost the same place.
This is exactly the problem a photo-guessing game solves with visual detail: a road marking, a language on a sign, a car's licence plate. A historical map has none of that, so 13-0 has to judge the click differently.
How the game judges a click
There is no distance score and no "you were 40 km away, here are 4,000 points". A click is either a hit or a miss, and the rule has two parts: the click has to be inside the colony, or near its border while inside no other colony at all.
That second condition is the one that keeps the game honest. Delaware and Maryland are so close that any tolerance generous enough to forgive a near miss would also forgive a click landing squarely in Maryland — and then the map would stop measuring whether you know where Delaware is. Water can be forgiven. A neighbouring colony cannot.
Your cabinet widens the tolerance, from nothing at all up to roughly 46 km, which covers the sort of near miss you make when you know the right bay but not the right shore.
Want to test it instead of playing it?
There is a straight quiz version of this map on the site: thirteen prompts, a blank coastline, no clues and no tolerance. It is the fastest way to find out whether the geography below is actually in your head, and it takes about two minutes.
What actually tells them apart
If you want to stop needing the clues, these are the physical features that identify each colony on a coastline with no labels on it. This is the same knowledge a photo-guessing player builds up, pointed at one seaboard.
New Hampshire
The shortest coastline of the thirteen, wedged between Massachusetts and the Maine woods. If you are looking at a coastline that ends almost as soon as it starts, that is it.
Massachusetts
Cape Cod, the hook curling out into the Atlantic. Nothing else on the seaboard looks like it, and Boston sits in the bay behind it.
Rhode Island
The smallest shape on the map, all islands and inlets around Narragansett Bay. If a click could plausibly be two colonies at once, you are probably near here.
Connecticut
The Connecticut River runs the whole length of it and reaches the sea at Saybrook. It sits between New York and Rhode Island, with a coastline on Long Island Sound.
New York
The Hudson, running almost straight north to south into a harbour at the southern tip, with Long Island lying off it. The longest coastline of the thirteen.
New Jersey
Squeezed between two rivers — the Delaware on one side, the Hudson on the other — with the Atlantic along its eastern edge.
Pennsylvania
The one colony with no ocean coast at all. It is a rectangle reaching the water only through the Delaware estuary, with Philadelphia where the Schuylkill meets it.
Delaware
A narrow strip of farmland on the western shore of Delaware Bay. The hardest shape on the map: small, thin, and about five kilometres from Maryland's Eastern Shore.
Maryland
It wraps around the Chesapeake on both sides, so it has two shores rather than one, and the bay is inside it rather than between it and anything.
Virginia
South of the Potomac, holding the Chesapeake's southern shore, with the capital on a peninsula between two rivers.
North Carolina
The Outer Banks: a line of sandbars standing off the coast with shallow sounds behind them. The coastline here does not touch the mainland properly.
South Carolina
The rice coast, low and marshy, with Charles Town on a peninsula where two rivers meet the Atlantic.
Georgia
The southernmost colony, its coast running from the Savannah River down toward Spanish Florida. The last one founded, and the last shape on the map.
A note on what this is not
13-0 is an independent game and has no connection to GeoGuessr, which is a separate product made by a different company. Nothing here uses its maps, its imagery or its scoring. The comparison on this page is only about the kind of game it is: you get partial evidence, you commit to a location, and you find out whether you were right.
FAQ — 13 colonies geography games
Q1.Is this GeoGuessr?
No, and it is not affiliated with GeoGuessr in any way. GeoGuessr drops you into a photograph and asks where you are. 13-0 gives you a written clue about a historical colony and asks you to click it on a map of the seaboard. They share the underlying instinct — place the thing from partial information — and almost nothing else.
Q2.Do I need to know the thirteen colonies to play?
No. The first clue of each round is a nickname or an anecdote that is often enough on its own if you know the history at all, and the game's result screen tells you what each colony was, so you learn them by playing. The second and third clues make it much easier, and those are what the cabinet buys.
Q3.Which colonies are hardest to place?
Delaware, Rhode Island and New Jersey, in roughly that order. Delaware is a thin strip beside a bay with Maryland a few kilometres away; Rhode Island is the smallest shape on the map with Connecticut pressed against it; New Jersey is a corridor between two rivers. The four New England colonies together occupy less space than Virginia.
Q4.Is there a timer?
No. Nothing in 13-0 is timed. You can study the coastline for as long as you like before clicking, and the map stays on screen after the round is settled so you can see where the colony actually was.
Q5.Can I play the same map again?
Every run reshuffles the order the thirteen are asked for, so you cannot memorise a sequence, but the map itself is fixed and always shows the colonial borders. Play it enough times and you stop needing the clues, which is the point.
Thirteen shapes. Do you know them?
Free to play, no account, and it takes about five minutes.
Play 13-0 ↗