Map quiz · Thirteen colonies
13 Colonies
Map Quiz
A map of the colonial seaboard with no place names on it, and thirteen colonies to find. Each question names one and you click where you think it is. No clues, no hints, no signup — just you and the coastline, scored out of thirteen.
Name the thirteen on the map
Thirteen questions, asked in a shuffled order. Each one names a colony and you click it on the map. No clues, no hints and no tolerance — only a click inside the right colony scores. You get the answer straight away either way, so the quiz teaches as it goes.
All thirteen are fair game
Connecticut · Delaware · Georgia · Maryland · Massachusetts · New Hampshire · New Jersey · New York · North Carolina · Pennsylvania · Rhode Island · South Carolina · Virginia
Colonial borders. Maine is part of Massachusetts and West Virginia is part of Virginia, as both were for the whole colonial period.
How the quiz works
Thirteen questions, asked one at a time in a shuffled order. A question names a colony — Click on Delaware — and you click it on the map. The click is judged by whether it landed inside that colony, using the same colonial borders the rest of the site uses. Nothing else counts; there is no partial credit for being close.
You get the answer immediately. If you were right the colony turns amber and stays that way, so the map fills in as you go and you can see how much of the seaboard you have accounted for. If you were wrong, the colony you should have clicked is shown in red and the one you actually hit is named, which is the part that teaches you something.
A full run takes about two minutes. The order reshuffles every time, so retaking it is a real test rather than a memory exercise — you cannot learn the sequence, only the coastline.
Which colonies cost you points
The thirteen are not equally hard to find. Nearly every missed question comes from the same handful of small, crowded shapes in the middle of the map, where the colonies sit only a few dozen kilometres apart.
Delaware
HardestA thin strip of farmland on the western shore of Delaware Bay, with Maryland about five kilometres away across the water. On the map it is one of the smallest shapes there is, and the easiest to lose against its neighbour.
Rhode Island
HardThe smallest colony, and almost all of it is Narragansett Bay — islands and inlets rather than a single outline. Connecticut presses against its western edge, so a click slightly too far left is wrong.
New Jersey
HardA corridor between two rivers, the Delaware and the Hudson, with the Atlantic on its eastern side. It has no distinctive shape of its own: it is defined entirely by what surrounds it.
Maryland
TrickyIt wraps around the Chesapeake on both sides, so it looks like two colonies rather than one. Its capital sits on the western shore; its Eastern Shore sits across the bay, next to Delaware.
Connecticut
TrickyWedged between New York and Rhode Island with only a short coastline on Long Island Sound. It is easy to place the river and still click the wrong side of it.
The rest
FairCape Cod gives Massachusetts away, the Hudson identifies New York, the Outer Banks mark North Carolina, and the southernmost coast is Georgia. Virginia and Pennsylvania are large enough to hit without precision.
How to get a 13 out of 13
- 01
Learn the two anchors first
Massachusetts and Georgia are the two ends: Cape Cod in the north, the Savannah River in the south. Get those two and everything else sits between them, which turns a blank coastline into a sequence.
- 02
Then the two that wrap water
Maryland surrounds the Chesapeake and Virginia holds its southern shore. Once you can see the bay as a thing Maryland is wrapped around, half the middle of the map stops being ambiguous.
- 03
Count the New England group
Four small colonies stacked west to east: New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut. Together they take up less space than Virginia, which is why they are where most quiz points are lost.
- 04
Remember the two absorbed shapes
Maine is part of Massachusetts and West Virginia is part of Virginia on this map, because neither existed separately in the colonial period. That is why there are thirteen shapes and not fifteen.
Every colony has a full history, its colonial capital and its founding year on the thirteen colonies page. Reading it once is usually enough to move a score from single figures into double.
Why thirteen shapes, not fifteen
The quiz uses colonial borders, which are not the modern state lines. Two present-day states were part of larger colonies for the whole period this quiz covers, so they have no separate shape on the map:
Maine is inside Massachusetts.
The District of Maine was governed from Boston until it became a state in 1820. Clicking the far north-east is the right answer for Massachusetts, not a mistake.
West Virginia is inside Virginia.
The western counties split away in 1863, during the Civil War. On this map Virginia runs all the way to the Ohio River, because colonially it did.
East and West Florida, Nova Scotia, Quebec and Bermuda are also absent — they were British possessions in 1776, but they were not among the thirteen that declared independence, so they are not in the quiz.
FAQ — the 13 colonies map quiz
Q1.Is this 13 colonies map quiz free?
Yes. The quiz runs entirely in your browser, needs no account and no signup, and there is no limit on how many times you take it. Nothing is uploaded anywhere — your score is not stored unless you go on to file a campaign result in the full game.
Q2.How many questions are there?
Thirteen — one for each colony. The order is shuffled every time you start, so you cannot learn a sequence and coast through it. Each question names a colony and you click it on the map; you get the answer immediately, right or wrong.
Q3.Does the quiz give hints or a tolerance?
No. It is deliberately stricter than the campaign mode: only a click inside the named colony scores. There is no clue, no hint, and no border tolerance, because the point of a map quiz is to find out whether you actually know where the colony is.
Q4.Can I use it for a class or a study group?
Yes. It works on a phone, a tablet or a projector, it needs no login, and a full run takes about two minutes. The most useful classroom pattern is to take it once cold, then work through the thirteen colonies guide, then take it again — the improvement between the two attempts is the part that sticks.
Q5.Why are there thirteen colonies and not fifteen?
Because the quiz uses colonial borders. The District of Maine was governed from Boston until 1820 and West Virginia split from Virginia in 1863, so both are folded into their parent colonies here. East and West Florida, Nova Scotia and Quebec were not among the thirteen that declared independence.
Q6.What is the difference between this and the 13-0 game?
Same map, different game. This is a straight quiz: thirteen prompts, thirteen clicks, no help. 13-0 adds a five-round cabinet draft in front of the map, and the cabinet you build decides how forgiving the map is — retries, a border tolerance and three tiers of clue. If the quiz feels too bare, the campaign is the same geography with a strategy layer on it.
If you want more than a quiz
13-0 — the full game
The same map with a five-round cabinet draft in front of it. Your cabinet buys retries, clue budget and a border tolerance.
Free the Colonies
How the campaign judges a click, and how to spend what the draft gave you when you are not certain.
13 Colonies GeoGuessr
What each coastline feature actually identifies, colony by colony — the geography behind the quiz.
Thirteen shapes. Two minutes.
Free, no signup, and it reshuffles every time you take it.
Take the quiz ↑