Fifty states and a district
Why Washington, D.C. rides alongside the fifty states on the map of the first sequel — and what still isn't documented about its scope.
Why Washington, D.C. counts
Where in the U.S.A. (1986) narrows the chase from a whole planet to a single country, and its map covers all fifty states plus Washington, D.C. — a federal district, not a state, riding along on the same list. It's the same logic the original World game used a year earlier (see the world map): the roster is built around notable stops worth a case, not a strict lesson in constitutional geography, so the nation’s capital earns its own spot even though it isn’t technically a state.
Climbing to Super Sleuth
The reward structure scales with that bigger map. Where the original game promotes players through five ranks to Ace Detective, Where in the U.S.A. runs a longer ladder that ends at Super Sleuth (the full sequence, from Gumshoe on up, is covered at rank progression). Clues lean on state-level trivia — nicknames, capitals, products, and landmarks — in place of the flags and currencies the original game used, decoded with the boxed Fodor’s USA guide. A longer rank ladder over a smaller map is a deliberate trade: with only fifty-one stops instead of the original’s spread across the globe, more ranks give the game room to keep handing out fresh cases before a player runs out of new states to be sent to.
What's still undocumented
Unlike Where in Europe’s confirmed 34-nation, 1,000-clue count, no reliable source checked for this entry gives an exact city or clue total for the 1986 U.S.A. map. Fifty states and one district is well established; a precise stop-by-stop count isn’t, and it's better to note that gap than to invent a number.
The first of a pattern
What matters more than an exact count is what this game established: shrinking the map to a single country, only a year after the original shipped, set the template every later entry would follow. Where in Europe narrowed to a continent again but with far more density; Where in Time and Where in America’s Past swapped geography for chronology entirely. Where in the U.S.A. is the first sign that Brøderbund saw the “chase a crook across a bounded, teachable map” formula as reusable well beyond a single globe-spanning game.
The boxed Fodor’s USA guide reinforced that shift in scale: unlike the almanac's country-by-country entries in the original game, a domestic travel guide organises its material state by state and city by city, which is exactly the granularity this narrower map needed.