French Départements: Why Players Find Only Half of Them
October 26, 2026 · 3 min read
Metropolitan France has 96 départements, each with a name, a number and a préfecture. Our French départements map game lets you play all three ways: find a département by its name, by its number, or by its préfecture.
It is one of the hardest maps on DodoThinks. Across 832 answers since mid-October 2026, players got only 49% right. For comparison, players get 80% on the map of Italy's 20 regions and 70% on Spain's 50 provinces.
Why it is so hard
Three reasons stand out:
- There are many of them. 96 shapes of similar size on one map, with no coast or border to help for most of them.
- Many names repeat the same rivers. The Loire, the Seine, the Garonne and the Marne each give their name to several départements.
- The interior is a sea of similar shapes. The départements of the Massif Central and the Paris basin all look alike on a blank map.
The hardest so far
Because there are 96 départements, each one has only been asked 12 to 17 times so far. Treat these as early numbers.
| Département | No. | Found |
|---|---|---|
| Eure-et-Loir | 28 | 2 of 12 |
| Lozère | 48 | 4 of 13 |
| Corrèze | 19 | 4 of 13 |
| Nièvre | 58 | 4 of 12 |
| Haute-Garonne | 31 | 7 of 17 |
| Marne | 51 | 5 of 12 |
| Ille-et-Vilaine | 35 | 5 of 12 |
| Doubs | 25 | 5 of 12 |
| Loiret | 45 | 6 of 14 |
Haute-Garonne is the surprise. It contains Toulouse, France's fourth-largest city, but players found it fewer than half the time. Lozère, the least populated département in France, is in the Massif Central, surrounded by others of similar size.
The easiest so far is Finistère (29), found every time. It is the western tip of Brittany; the name comes from the Latin for "end of the earth". Moselle (57) is next.
The name traps
| Asked for | Clicked instead |
|---|---|
| Corse-du-Sud (2A) | Haute-Corse (2B) |
| Paris (75) | Val-de-Marne (94) |
| Yonne (89) | Yvelines (78) |
| Loiret (45) | Maine-et-Loire (49) |
| Loiret (45) | Indre-et-Loire (37) |
| Corrèze (19) | Lot (46) |
| Ardennes (08) | Meuse (55) |
- Corsica has two départements. Haute-Corse (2B) is the northern one, with Bastia. Corse-du-Sud (2A) is the southern one, with Ajaccio.
- Yonne and Yvelines share a first letter but are far apart. Yvelines (78) is just west of Paris. Yonne (89) is in Burgundy, south-east of Paris.
- The Loire family: Loire (42), Haute-Loire (43), Loire-Atlantique (44), Loiret (45), Maine-et-Loire (49), Indre-et-Loire (37) and Saône-et-Loire (71) all take their name from the river. Loiret, with Orléans, is the one at the top of the big bend of the Loire, closest to Paris.
- Paris and the petite couronne: Paris (75) is the small dot in the middle. Around it, Hauts-de-Seine (92) is to the west, Seine-Saint-Denis (93) to the north-east and Val-de-Marne (94) to the south-east.
Use the numbers
French players have an advantage: they see département numbers every day on car number plates and postcodes. The numbers are not random. Most were given in alphabetical order, from Ain (01) to Yonne (89), and the départements around Paris (91 to 95) were added when the Paris region was reorganised in the 1960s.
That means the numbers do not follow the map, but they do help you remember names: if you know 13 is Bouches-du-Rhône (Marseille) and 69 is Rhône (Lyon), the alphabet tells you roughly where every other number falls. The number round in our game trains exactly this.
How to learn all 96
- Learn the 13 regions first. Our map of France's regions has only 13, and each département belongs to one.
- Then the coasts and borders, which are easier because the shape helps.
- Then one region at a time, starting with the ones you know.
- Print a blank map from our cartes vierges and fill it in by hand.
The game page is in French, but you only need to click the map.
About this data
These are 832 answers on the DodoThinks French départements map between 13 October and 26 October 2026. With 96 départements, the per-département numbers are still small. We will update this article as more people play.