Bigger — states, counties and cities, which one is larger?

Two boards, and you pick one when the game opens. Domestic is the American pile: all fifty states, 13 counties and 152 cities, shuffled together, where Los Angeles County has more people in it than forty of the fifty states. International is that same pile with the world added rather than swapped in, 144 countries and 152 more cities, where the same county outweighs Austria, Switzerland and Hungary and fifty-one others. Keeping the American cards in the international board is the point of it: a county against a country is the question, and a pile with no county in it cannot ask it. The mode sits in the corner of the board and changes there. Each keeps its own best streak.

The numbers. American figures are the Census Bureau's 2024 estimates and its 2024 boundary files. A country's population and land area are the World Bank's most recent year for each. A world city's count comes from Wikidata, read off the same administrative unit whose boundary is drawn behind it, and its land area is measured off that boundary with the sea and the lakes taken out.

Land area means land. Water inside the border is out of every figure here, a coastal city's harbor included, so the second metric asks one question of the whole board rather than a different one per tier.

The outlines behind each card come from the same boundary files, each drawn on a projection centered on itself and scaled to fill its panel, so nothing in the picture tells you the answer.

Nothing is asked against its own container. A state is never put against a county inside it, a city never against its own county or state, and nothing American against the United States: a thing that contains another is not smaller than it, so there would be no question.

It gets harder. Early pairs are far apart. The longer the streak runs, the closer the two numbers are drawn, down to a few percent.

A world city is one administrative unit, the same way an American one is a Census place. Paris is the commune and its 2.1 million, not the built-up area of eleven million around it; Tokyo is the metropolis. Where no boundary could be shown to hold the population the name is being priced at, the city was left off rather than guessed at.

Washington appears once, as a city, being a state-equivalent, a county and a place all at the same time. Virginia's independent cities are cities here, not counties. Connecticut's planning regions are left out.