I spend my days around maps of the U.S., which makes it a little embarrassing how often I cannot place a county. Borderline is the fix: you are given a place name, you click where you think it is on a black outline map, and you find out how close to “borderline” your geography really is.
1 Play
2 How it plays
- States mode: the outline of the U.S. appears with no interior borders. Click inside the named state to score. Miss, and the correct state is highlighted.
- Counties mode: pick a state and the map zooms to its outline. You get county names, or the locally correct equivalent (parishes, boroughs and so on).
- Easy or Hard: Easy keeps every answered shape colored on the map as a running record; Hard clears it between guesses.
- Untimed or Blitz: choose 10, 25 or all rounds, or race a 60-second clock.
- Zoom and pan for fiddly shapes like tiny islands and thin coastal counties.
The game remembers your best score per mode in localStorage, and once you have missed something enough times it surfaces a “you struggle most with” list. At the end, Retry these replays just what you got wrong, and Copy result puts a Wordle-style summary on your clipboard to share.
3 Under the hood
It is pure static HTML, CSS and JavaScript (ES modules): no build step, no server, no CDN, built to live on GitHub Pages. Boundary data comes from the U.S. Census Bureau via us-atlas. Keeping it dependency-free means it loads fast and is easy for anyone to read and fork.
The code is on GitHub — it is still borderline playable, so bug reports are welcome.
Citation
@online{bhandari2026,
author = {Bhandari, Pukar},
title = {Borderline: {A} {U.S.} {Geography} {Guessing} {Game}},
date = {2026-09-21},
url = {https://ar-puuk.github.io/posts/borderline/},
langid = {en}
}