Mapped, Drawn & Bordered

Think you know your U.S. states? Test your geography skills and creativity with Mapped, Drawn & Bordered, a fun and challenging game that puts your state-drawing abilities to the test! Whether you're a geography buff or just looking for a unique way to pass the time, this game offers an entertaining way to explore the United States while testing your geography and map drawing skills.

I've always loved Time's See How Well You Can Draw All 50 States, so I decided to create my own state-drawing game.

In Time's game, you draw each U.S. state from memory, one at a time. After each drawing, the game grades your accuracy and adds your version of the state to a map of the United States.

My new game Mapped, Drawn & Bordered, offers a new twist. You start the game by selecting a U.S. state from a drop-down menu and then draw that state on top of an interactive map. The map includes town and city names to give you a few helpful clues, but it excludes the actual state borders and labels.

Once you've completed your drawing, the game calculates a percentage score based on how closely your sketch matches the actual state border.

How the Game was Made

Map Library & Map Tiles

Mapped, Drawn & Bordered uses the Maplibre mapping library with OpenFreeMap map tiles. OpenFreeMap allows free customization of maps, which was essential for this game. This means I was able to use Maputnik to remove the state borders and the state name labels from the map used in Mapped, Drawn & Bordered.

Drawing Tools

The drawing tools in Mapped, Drawn & Bordered are provided by the mapbox-gl-draw plug-in. mapbox-gl-draw allows you to add drawing tools to Mapbox and Maplibre powered maps.

Scoring

The scoring is all handled by Turf.js. Turf's advanced geospatial analysis operations are used in the game to compare the player drawn polygons to the actual state polygons. The scoring system is very simple. It is based on this formula:

More 2024 Maps of the Year

On New Year's Day, I posted the Maps Mania round-up of the 2024 Year in Maps. I am not the only one who has spent time exploring the best maps of 2024. 

The Global Investigative Journalism Network's Top 10 Data Journalism Projects of 2024  included maps from Hungary's Atlo, Japan's Nikkei, and Germany's netzpolitik.

Danube Warming Up

Atló's Danube Warming Up uses a Mapbox story-map to visualize the effects of global warming on Europe's second-longest river. The project presents multiple visualizations of how global heating has impacted the Danube and its broader watershed. For example, the map above illustrates the river, color-coded along its length, based on annual average temperature increases between 2010 and 2020.

What Happened When the JAL Plane Caught Fire

In January, Japanese newspaper Nikkei created an impressive - and harrowing - mapped re-enactment of a plane collision in Tokyo. 

On January 2, 2024, Japan Airlines Flight 516 (JAL516) collided with a plane operated by the Japan Coast Guard.The interactive project, What Happened When the JAL Plane Caught Fire, used Google Earth imagery to create a 3D reconstruction of the crash. This reconstruction is incorporated into a story-map to explain the sequence of events that led to the collision.

How data brokers sell our location data

In July Bayerischer Rundfunk and netzpolitik published a joint investigation into the global trade of location data.

In Under Surveillance, Bayerischer Rundfunk revealed how location data from mobile phones is openly sold on the market. Alarmingly, this data included the locations of U.S. spies working in Germany. By analyzing the data of individuals spending most of their working hours at a U.S. military base in Germany, the broadcasters identified an individual working in the "Tin Can," a building used for U.S. internet surveillance. Using this data, they were even able to determine the spy’s home address in Germany.

Flowing Data's Best Data Visualization Projects of 2024 included maps from NASA, the German Foreign Office and The Pudding.

Your Name in Landsat

In 2024, NASA launched Your Name in Landsat, a playful tool that uses satellite imagery to spell out names with Earth features captured in Landsat images. Users can type their names into the tool to see them "written" in massive, natural shapes on Earth and even download these unique visualizations.

Climate Conflict Vulnerability Index Map

The German Foreign Office released an interactive map in 2024 visualizing climate and conflict risks worldwide. The Climate Conflict Vulnerability Index Map identifies regions where climate change and conflicts are likely to converge, highlighting areas with particularly vulnerable populations.

The United States of Abortion

In October, The Pudding published a diagrammatic cartogram of the United States titled The United States of Abortion. In this innovative cartogram, each state is represented by a small maze, symbolizing the difficulties women now face when navigating abortion policies in each state.

If you want to explore even more of 2024's best data visualizations then the Datawrapper's Data Vis Lists, 2024 consists of a comprehensive round-up of data viz round-ups published by some of the internet's best data visualization teams and individuals. 

The Interactive Climate Atlas

The Copernicus Interactive Climate Atlas is a new interactive map from the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (CS3). This map-based application uses historical climate data and modeled future scenarios to visualize the potential impacts of various global heating levels.

C3S, established by the European Union, aims to provide authoritative information and services that help society understand, adapt to, and mitigate the effects of climate change. The new Copernicus Interactive Climate Atlas aligns with this mission by enabling users to explore climate change projections through a range of interactive tools. These tools allow for the geographic visualization of data, analysis of trends over time, and insights through features like climate stripes.

Select a region on the map using the dropdown menu, then click the "regional information" button to access a variety of visualizations depicting climate change scenarios for the selected area. These visualizations include a time chart, which shows average annual temperature changes for each year since 1940, and a climate stripes chart, offering a clear visual representation of the same data over time.

2024 - the Year in Maps

Election Maps

There were a lot of elections in 2024. Which meant there were also a lot of election maps. In the UK, cartograms dominated the media's visualizations of the Labour Party's sweeping victory in the General Election. These UK Election Maps effectively highlighted the vast number of seats won by Labour, offering a clear and impactful representation of the results.

In the United States, Presidential Election Maps largely favored arrow swing maps. For instance, this Guardian map used red and blue arrows to depict the significant shift towards the Republican Party across urban and rural areas alike. This shift was evident even in majority-Black and heavily Latino counties, demonstrating the widespread nature of this electoral swing towards Trump.

The Year of AI

2024 was undeniably the year artificial intelligence made its mark on culture and technology - and cartography was no exception. Interactive maps began to harness large language models (LLMs), enabling natural language searches of spatial data.

Platforms like Godview and Fuzzy Maps emerged as pioneers, offering AI-powered natural language search capabilities. Although still in their infancy, these tools hint at a future where searching and interacting with maps becomes more intuitive. During 2025, we could well see major players like Bing and Google more visibly integrate robust AI search capabilities into their own mapping platforms.

AI and machine learning also continued to revolutionize the field of remote sensing. Machine learning algorithms are increasingly adept at detecting objects in satellite imagery, enhancing our ability to monitor deforestation, illegal fishing, and wildlife, and to respond to disasters. As climate change intensifies, the role of AI in Earth observation will likely continue to expand, helping to monitor and (hopefully) mitigate its effects around the world.

One of the most entertaining uses of AI in 2024 was Panoramai., a playful tool that allowed users to modify the appearance of Google Maps Street View panoramas using simple AI prompts. Despite its lighthearted nature, the tool became so popular that it was eventually shut down due to the high costs associated with its heavy usage.

Free Maps for All

Two platforms stood out as my Maps of the Year: OpenFreeMap and VersaTiles. These open-source platforms offer map developers free access to custom map tiles for websites and applications, leveraging data from OpenStreetMap.

With commercial map providers' costs continuing to rise, OpenFreeMap and VersaTiles provided a much-needed alternative for developers. Their commitment to open-source principles and accessibility hopefully ensures that in 2025 even more developers can bring exciting map-based projects to life (and without prohibitive costs).