First choose any US city by entering it and choosing it in the drop-down box. Then, name any US city in each 100 mile circle/ring as the rings expand outward from your city of choice, trying to name SECOND LARGEST city in each circle. The first circle will include your city of choice as a possible answer.
PLEASE NOTE - You must type a '.' (period) after each city to submit it to prevent answering another city with a name you would be have to type to get your answer. If multiple cities have the name you submitted, only the largest one will be counted.
You accumulate points based on the population of the city you named in relation to the second largest city in the circle. A smaller city’s point total will be the ratio of its population to the largest, so if you name a city of 75K people and the largest city has 100K, you get 75 points. Naming the largest city will get you points based on the ratio of the 2nd largest city's population to the largest city's.
When you run out of time or end the quiz, you will see the current ring’s 2nd largest city at right (under ‘Answer Stats’ by your coordinates).
For example, if you choose ‘Chicago’ – you will be shown a circle of radius 100 miles centered at Chicago. Naming any city in this circle (including Chicago) will cause another ‘ring’ of radius 100 miles to appear outside that circle, however - you will want to try naming the SECOND LARGEST city you can to get more points. After completing that circle, you now need to name any US city in the new ring (but not within any previous circles/rings), again trying to name the 2nd largest city. If there are not two cities within the next ring of that distance, the ring will keep expanding by that distance until two cities fall within it.
Quiz Takers 
Sigh.. I missed 10 towns on intermediate. Just a blob in Illinois and Molokai island in Hawaii remained
Berlin, PA was the final touch!
Hah– I just finished and scrolled down to see the comments after missing one single town: Berlin, Pennsylvania.
The quiz isn’t working. I’ll type in “beg” and the timer will start, but no cities will start filling in when I type a name. I tried adding the state abbreviations, no avail. I’m using Chrome.
Working fine for me, maybe clear cache and reload
I’ve been working on the Intermediate difficulty level. Started off in the low 170’s and am down to 139. Areas like Chicagoland, Pennsylvania and California have proven the trickiest to reduce the number of cities. I’m also counting doubles, like having to do the city of Ava to do Avalon in California and Lake in Michigan to get Lake Placid.
Intermediate list is down to 128. The hard part is how long it takes to run through each time to see what the new tested city does. I’ll often have to change out a lot of cities just to see if I can eliminate 1 from the order. Florida, PA and TX have been the most challenging.
Yes running 120+ takes a long time and is very cumbersome…but still a very neat challenge.
As someone from Pennsylvania here are some good towns to know. State College, Erie, Allentown, Scranton, and Harrisburg. They help to fill in the mostly empty middle and help fill in some of the edges.
I prefer either Tyrone or Altoona over State College to cover middle PA. Fewer letters to type, and both cities appear in multiple states. Tyrone gets you virtually the same territory as State College.
My list is at 123. A big breakthrough was Mountain View, which shows up on the Big Island of Hawaii and a number of places on the mainland – prior to that I had to use 3 cities to cover all of the state of Hawaii.
Waimea covers Hawaii in one go
Intermediate list is now at 120. Nearly all of these are cities that occur in multiple states, so it’s getting really hard to find ones to remove since they are useful in several areas. I use Lake (not at all useful) to get to Lake City (which is extremely useful) and can’t seem to find a good combination of two cities that takes care of all the areas Lake City clears out for me. I only recently added Portage, which was huge in the upper midwest, and there are some surprising names like Winfield that occur pretty often.
Wow, very nice. I haven’t tried making an intermediate yet (aside from putting in my beginner list and finding I was nowhere near filling it LOL). Yes those were the areas that were most difficult to fill on beginner too.
My list is at 67, I keep playing around with different alternatives, but fear that I will have to make some massive changes to cut down below. The most frustrating this is that I keep getting Barstow as one of my last cities that doesn’t quite get clipped by all of the previously named cities.
yeah SoCal is tricky. I started using Del Mar at one point and it helped with SoCal and a specific spot of the east coast I had trouble with
The cool thing about Del Mar on Intermediate mode is that it just clips Avalon.
got this down to just typing 70 towns to cover the country. was at over 100 and moved some names around. think I might be able to remove a couple more before maxing out
got it to 66 now
down to 62
got it to 61 (including likes of the double of “Alto” needed to get to “Altoona”)
(able to delete Vinton with a new town I found that covers other multiple areas)