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Every state issues its own license plate, and no two of them look alike. That would be an easy clue if you could read one, but Street View blurs every plate it drives past, so what a round actually gives you is a smear of colour the size of a thumbnail. It turns out to be enough: the blur keeps the palette and the layout, and those are what separate one state from the next. This page is the full list of designs, and the game drills reading them blurred.
A license plate (a number plate, a tag) is issued by the state a car is registered in, and the standard passenger design is chosen by that state rather than by anybody federal. That is the whole reason this works: there is no national plate to dilute it, so the design is a state-level fact printed on the back of almost every vehicle in shot.
They are also stable and they are everywhere. A state runs one general-issue design for a decade or two before replacing it, and the cars around you carry it in car parks, driveways, at lights and on the road ahead. One design per state is what this game asks about, which is the design you will see most often and the one worth knowing cold.
What you will not get is a readable plate. Google blurs plates and faces automatically, so in a round the plate is a rounded rectangle of colour and very little else. Learning the sharp designs is still how you get there, because the blur is the design with the detail taken out: the colours that survive are the ones the design is mostly made of.
In this order, because each step throws away more of the map than the next one.
Now the traps. Cars travel: a plate is evidence about the car, not about the road, and near a state line the car park will be half full of the neighbours. Specialty and vanity plates are common and they look nothing like the general issue, older designs stay legal for years after a replacement lands, and dealer and temporary tags are their own thing entirely. Many states issue no front plate at all, so a car facing you may be showing you a blank. Take a plate as a strong hint that agrees or disagrees with the rest of the round, and let the road markings settle the argument.
One current passenger design per state. This is the reference half of the page: find the plate, and the state next to it is the answer.
| Plate | State |
|---|---|
| Alabama | |
| Alaska | |
| Arizona | |
| Arkansas | |
| California | |
| Colorado | |
| Connecticut | |
| Delaware | |
| Florida | |
| Georgia | |
| Hawaii | |
| Idaho | |
| Illinois | |
| Indiana | |
| Iowa | |
| Kansas | |
| Kentucky | |
| Louisiana | |
| Maine | |
| Maryland | |
| Massachusetts | |
| Michigan | |
| Minnesota | |
| Mississippi | |
| Missouri | |
| Montana | |
| Nebraska | |
| Nevada | |
| New Hampshire | |
| New Jersey | |
| New Mexico | |
| New York | |
| North Carolina | |
| North Dakota | |
| Ohio | |
| Oklahoma | |
| Oregon | |
| Pennsylvania | |
| Rhode Island | |
| South Carolina | |
| South Dakota | |
| Tennessee | |
| Texas | |
| Utah | |
| Vermont | |
| Virginia | |
| Washington | |
| West Virginia | |
| Wisconsin | |
| Wyoming |
These are the pictures as the game gives them to you, which is as the road gives them to you.
Colour this strong is doing all the work: nothing pale is in the running any more. Check the depth of it before you commit, because a second state blurs to a deeper gold, and the two are easy to keep apart side by side and easy to confuse from a moving car.
A single flat colour across the whole plate, which almost nothing else in the country does. This is the shape of clue worth memorising: one look, one state, no second guessing.
Dark plates are rare, so the darkness alone is most of the answer. The tint is the rest of it: this one holds a cold blue-slate cast, where the only other genuinely dark plate in the game blurs to something warmer and browner.
The plate that tells you least, and the one to recognise as such quickly. A pale grey blur with no band, no tint and no gradient fits a long list of states, so read it, note that it rules out everything colourful, and go and look at something else.
Yes, and they are one of the better clues in the United States, but only as colour. Street View blurs every plate it photographs, so you never read the state name or the characters. What survives is the palette and the layout, and those are enough to name a lot of states on their own.
Google blurs faces and license plates automatically before publishing imagery, for privacy. The blur is applied to the plate only, so the shape of the plate, its colours and the rough position of the dark and light areas all remain, which is what makes the blurred plate readable as a design rather than as a registration.
The ones that are not white. A plate that blurs to a saturated yellow, a flat green or a dark background is a short list of candidates or a single state, while the pale plates need the position of a band or the tint of the characters to separate them. The table on this page is sorted by state so you can compare the pale ones against each other.
No. Every state picks its own general-issue passenger design and replaces it every decade or two, and alongside it sells specialty plates that look nothing like the standard. This game asks about the current standard passenger design for each state, which is the one you will see most of on the road.
No, it tells you where the car is registered. Cars cross state lines constantly and near a border a car park can be half out-of-state, so a single plate is a hint rather than a verdict. Several plates agreeing with each other, or one plate agreeing with the road markings and the signage, is what makes it safe to commit.
Drill them blurred against a map, which is what the game on this page does: it shows the plate the way a round shows it, you click the state, and it tells you what you missed. Reading a table teaches you to recognise a sharp plate you will never be given.
If you want another United States clue that does settle a round on its own, the area codes on the side of a van are one: US Dialing Codes. The European roadside trainers work the same way as this one: European Bollards and European Chevrons.
