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The Maldives is a chain of coral atolls strung down the Indian Ocean for about eight hundred kilometres, almost all of it sea. The country is administered as twenty atolls plus the capital, Malé, which is a city of its own, and nobody names the islands one at a time: they are named by the atoll that holds them. A Maldivian address is an island and an atoll, and the atolls are what this map is made of.
Each atoll is drawn as the outline of its islands: the area the name covers on the water, not the few square kilometres of land inside it. The real atolls are rings of reef with islands along the rim, so the outline is close to the reef itself. The names are the administrative atolls, which are not always the geographic ones: the geographic atolls carry long names (Ari, Felidhe, Mulaku) and the administrative ones are named after the letters of the Dhivehi alphabet, which is why so many of them sound alike.
Malé is the exception. It is a city on a single island, and it sits in the middle of the rim of Kaafu, the atoll it was part of before it was made a separate unit.
The groups are not an official classification. They are the three parts of the chain it is usually described in, and a way to learn the map a piece at a time.
Malé is the smallest unit on the map: a single crowded island with Kaafu all around it. It is the one to find first.
Addu is the southernmost atoll, below the equator and set apart from the rest of the chain, with Gnaviyani the only unit between it and Gaafu Dhaalu.
Thaa is one of the larger atolls in the south, with Dhaalu to its north and Laamu to its south.
Twenty administrative atolls, and the city of Malé, which is its own unit. The game draws all twenty-one.
The geographic atolls have long names that were hard to use in government, so the administrative atolls were named after letters of the Dhivehi alphabet, and several of the geographic atolls were split across two letters (Haa Alif and Haa Dhaalu are one geographic atoll, Thiladhunmathi).
It has seven provinces, but they are an administrative layer that few people name. The groups here are the north, the centre and the south of the chain, and they will not match every list you find.
Dhivehi names have several romanisations. The game uses Haa Alif, Alif Alif and Gaafu Alif, which you will also see as Haa Alifu, Alifu Alifu and Gaafu Alifu.
