Our Regions of the United States: The Logic Behind Geotoys’ Regional Puzzles

Ask ten Americans where the South begins and you'll likely get eleven answers. The previous statement may seem like a bit much, but consider this: there is no single authoritative map of America's regions. The US Census Bureau, the National Weather Service, the Federal Reserve, and even the NFL all draw the lines differently, each optimized for its own purpose.

When Geotoys decided to branch out into its own colorful and stylized collection of Regional USA Puzzles, what landmarks and symbols to highlight were one question. Choosing an artist to create the icons was another important decision to be made (shout out to the brilliant Mandy Sloan Meador). But the one that’s always present but not expected by most of our puzzlers - how do we break down the regions of the United States?

The Puzzle (and Map) Maker’s Dilemma

When a question of how to move forward with our puzzles comes across the desks of the team at Geotoys, we generally reduce our answer down to making sure it’s fact-based, education-forward and fun. Leading with that vision, we often run into other issues - in this case the realities that come with manufacturing an affordable 250-piece puzzle. This series of builds assembles into one of two different dimensional options: 19x13 in or 17x17 in - basically a rectangle or square shape.

Mapmakers have wrestled with a version of this problem for centuries. The moment you try to render a sphere — our round, tilted, imperfect Earth — onto a flat piece of paper, something has to give. Greenland appears larger than Africa on a Mercator projection, when in reality Africa is roughly fourteen times its size. The poles stretch, the oceans distort, and every cartographer has to decide which distortion they can live with. Fitting the regions of the United States into a rectangle or square is a smaller-scale version of that same negotiation: the geography doesn't change, but the way you represent it always involves a choice.

The solution: Our “Goldilocks” Principle + remembering what makes a puzzle great

The regional groupings in this puzzle series didn't happen by accident — they're the result of what you might call a Goldilocks principle. Too many states in a single map and the puzzle becomes unwieldy, the geography muddled; too few and the map feels slight, almost arbitrary. The rectangle and square formats that anchor this series aren't just manufacturing constraints — they create a visual structure that keeps each region understandable and fun to build. A great place to see this logic is in the Rockies and Great Plains Regional Puzzle, two distinct American landscapes that share a puzzle. Individually, those nine states are too sparse and oddly shaped to anchor a regional puzzle on their own. Together, they form a solid, recognizable chunk of the country that works both geographically and geometrically. The Southeast Regional Puzzle, with its ten states, is the one region that pushes that upper limit. But if any part of the country can get away with it, it's a region whose states share so much layered history that keeping them together feels less like a compromise and more like an inevitability.

Sometimes the choices were easy: where history helped

Selecting the states for our New England Regional Puzzle is the clearest example of history doing the heavy lifting. Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island were among the first states in our union, and whether you've been there or just read about them in a history book, you’ll likely get the sense that they've always belonged together. Our Mid-Atlantic Regional Puzzle required a bit more thought, particularly when it came to West Virginia. Most people's instinct might be to place it in the Southeast, and geographically that's an understandable read. But West Virginia exists as a state precisely because it refused to go south — it broke from Virginia during the Civil War to remain in the Union, making its place alongside New York, Pennsylvania and Maryland a matter of historical record rather than editorial opinion.

Our Pacific Regional Puzzle presented a different issue - the inclusion of non-contiguous states (that means states not physically connected to the rest of the country). Hawaii and Alaska are obvious geographic outliers, separated by the Pacific Ocean and Canada, respectively. But both entered the union in 1959, at the tail end of America's westward expansion story, and that shared chapter connects them naturally to Washington, Oregon and California — states whose own identities were forged by that same push toward the Pacific.

The Midwest Regional Puzzle offered a fairly straightforward grouping. Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana and Ohio cluster naturally around the Great Lakes and the upper Mississippi valley, giving this regional puzzle a shape that practically draws itself. You'll notice that Kansas and Nebraska — states many people would traditionally place in the Midwest — appear instead in the Rockies and Great Plains puzzle. That's not an oversight; it's the Goldilocks principle at work again, and what remains is the industrial, lake-anchored Midwest that most Americans picture when they hear the word. 

The hard calls: where history and geometry had to negotiate

Some states didn't fall neatly into any one region, and that's where the Goldilocks principle had to do its heaviest lifting. Nevada’s presence in our Rockies & Great Plains Regional Puzzle is a good example. Geographically it's the Great Basin desert, not the Rockies, but it fills out the interior West piece in a way that simply works visually, and its history as part of America's westward expansion ties it naturally to its neighbors. Kentucky presented a similar puzzle. Its Appalachian identity puts it in the same conversation as West Virginia, which lands in the Mid-Atlantic region, but Kentucky's shape and its deep connections to the states around it made the Southeast Regional Puzzle it’s more natural home. Texas and Oklahoma might raise a few eyebrows in the Southwest Regional Puzzle — both states have their own fierce sense of identity that resists easy categorization — but together they complete a shape that holds, and sometimes that's the best answer to the question of whether or not the design makes for a great puzzle.

Every map of America's regions will lead to disagreement. The Census Bureau's version, the Weather Service's version, the NFL's version — they all draw different lines, and none of them are wrong exactly, but none of them are simply right either. They’re all ultimately created to serve the mission of the organization. And our mission? To educate, challenge and entertain kids and adults while learning about the geography of our beautiful planet. Thank you for taking the time to explore our choices with us. Honestly, every time we hear feedback on a map or puzzle, we take it as a win - it’s the best sign that our dissectologists are GeoCurious!