For teachers & students
Free browser history games built for a lesson, not a login screen. Students stand inside a 360° reconstruction of a documented historical moment, read it for evidence, then say where and when it happened. No accounts, no installs, nothing to buy — 50 researched moments across 6 periods, 9 quizzes and a 72-question trivia bank, plus 4 lesson plans below with timings and discussion questions.
No sign-up · no install · works on Chromebooks, iPads and phones
Every mode below is self-contained. Nothing carries over between lessons, so a five-minute starter and a full workshop can use the same site without any setup.
Put the Daily Challenge on the projector and take one round as a class. Students shout out evidence, one student drives the pin, the class votes on a year. Everyone in the world gets the same five rounds that day, so it works as a running whole-school competition.
Guess the Year gives one scene and five attempts at its date, with an earlier/later hint and a fresh clue after each miss. No map, no timer — it fits either end of a lesson and produces a natural class discussion about which clue actually settled it.
Pairs share a device and play a themed collection — one era, one country, or one event. Each pair writes down the evidence they used before they lock a guess, then swaps sheets with another pair to argue the dating.
Run one of the lesson plans below: a full five-round game framed as an evidence exercise, with a structured write-up and a plenary that compares the class's reasoning against what the scene actually shows.
5 sheets that print straight from the browser — an evidence sheet, a dating clues card, a scorecard, cut-out timeline cards with an answer key, and exit tickets. Three of them need no devices at all.
Written to be run as-is: an objective you can put on the board, timed steps, and plenary questions that work whether or not the class scored well.
Model it · 5 min
Open a single round on the projector and fill the first column together without guessing. Materials, tools, clothing, transport, signage, vegetation, light. Refuse every 'it looks like' until the column has ten entries.
Convert observations to inferences · 10 min
Move down the list and ask what each item rules out. Timber scaffolding rules out steel cranes. No chimneys rules out an industrial city. Written script narrows the region before it narrows the century.
Independent rounds · 20 min
Pairs play a five-round game, completing the sheet before each guess. They must write a one-sentence justification for the year before moving the slider. The score is secondary; the sheet is the assessed work.
Plenary · 10 min
Take the round the class scored worst on. Reveal the answer and the fact card, then ask which observation should have been decisive and why it was overlooked or over-read.
Discussion
Fix the bands · 8 min
Walk the class timeline on the board. For each band, agree one visual test: muscle power and stone, treadwheel cranes and timber, iron and smoke, concrete and glass.
Sort before you date · 7 min
Show four scenes with no dates. Students only place each one in a band, not a year, and say which visual test decided it.
Play the timeline · 15 min
Pairs work through a period collection, recording the year the game reveals next to the year they guessed. The gap column is the data for the plenary.
Analyse the gaps · 10 min
Plot the class's average error by band. Almost always, older bands are guessed worse. Ask why: fewer surviving details, slower visible change, and less familiarity all count as answers.
Discussion
Play the national collection · 10 min
Open the country collection for your own country and take three rounds. Students note what kinds of moments made the cut: dated, located, and visually distinctive.
Research a candidate · 20 min
Each group picks one local event and must produce four things: the year, the coordinates, a one-sentence description, and two independent sources that agree on the date.
Peer review · 10 min
Groups swap candidates and act as editors. Reject anything where the sources disagree, the location is vague, or the moment would look identical in any decade.
Submit and compare · 10 min
Surviving candidates go to the country page's suggestion wall. Class votes on which would be hardest to guess — and therefore best as a round.
Discussion
Set the rules · 3 min
Teams write answers rather than shouting them, so every student commits before the reveal. Questions are already tagged easy, medium and hard — award 1, 2 and 3 points.
Run three era rounds · 15 min
Pick three era categories from the bank. Read six questions per round, reveal after each round, and read out the note beneath each answer — that is where the actual teaching happens.
Tie-break with a scene · 7 min
Settle a draw with one Guess the Year scene. Closest year wins, which rewards reasoning rather than recall.
Discussion
The moment library is banded by period. Each band has a written overview with the dating clues specific to it, so you can set reading before students play.
Pyramids, temples and amphitheatres — scenes dated by construction technique and city layout.
4 moments
Period guideCharters, cathedrals and treasure fleets, where armour and ship rig give the century away.
3 moments
Period guidePrinting, empire and playhouses. Timber towns and sailing rigs are the clues that matter.
6 moments
Period guideSteam, iron and glass. Rails, bridges and exhibition halls date a scene within a decade.
16 moments
Period guideFlight, revolution and mass production, read from aircraft types, cars and street signage.
11 moments
Period guideCold war walls, concert stages and skylines — skylines and crowds do the dating here.
10 moments
Period guideTeaching a national curriculum? Every one of the 72 country collections groups moments by nation, and the full world history timeline runs across all 6 periods in order.
Most of these moments happened before photography existed. Each 360° scene is a researched reconstruction: the location, the date, the construction stage, the clothing and the technology are checked against the record, and the image is rendered from that brief. Treat them as illustrations built from evidence — excellent for teaching visual inference, not admissible as primary sources.
Every round resolves to a documented event with a real year and real coordinates, and every moment page carries a written account, the dating clues and a short Q&A. When a class disputes a date, the moment page is where the argument gets settled.
Coverage follows the surviving record: stone-building, well-documented societies are over-represented, and the period pages explain that bias instead of hiding it. That gap is itself a discussion point in a source-criticism lesson.
Anyone can build a map, and community maps are quality-screened before they reach the public library. For a fully vetted set, stay on the authored collections — the daily challenge, the era timeline, the event themes and the country pages.
Any modern browser on a Chromebook, laptop, iPad or phone. The 360° viewer needs WebGL, which is on by default on school Chromebooks. Nothing to install and no extensions.
Students do not need to sign in to play. Progress is kept on the device, so a guest can finish a full game, see the results and share a score without an email address. Signing in only matters if a student wants their character progression to follow them between devices.
Each 360° scene is a large image, so on a shared connection expect a few seconds of loading per round. If the wifi is fighting you, run the text-only quizzes or the trivia bank instead — they load instantly and work on anything.
The round timer is optional and off unless a student turns it on, so nobody is rushed. The year control accepts typed input and century jumps as well as dragging, which makes it usable with a keyboard and on a touchscreen.
Instant-loading, printable-friendly and answerable without a 360° viewer — useful for homework, cover lessons and end-of-unit revision.
One era, questions against a 20-second clock, a score on screen at the end. Good as a lesson starter, a plenary or a first-day hook — no accounts, nothing to mark.
Yes. Every game mode, quiz and trivia question on the site is free to play in a browser, with no licence, no class code and no purchase. Credits only exist for generating your own AI panoramas, which no lesson here requires.
No. Students can play a full five-round game, the daily challenge, Guess the Year, every quiz and the trivia bank without signing in. An account only saves character progression across devices, so it is optional for classroom use.
The panorama game suits ages 12 and up, because dating a scene rewards background knowledge. The quizzes and trivia bank work from about age 11, and the daily challenge works as a whole-class activity at any level because the discussion carries the weaker guessers.
Yes. It runs in the browser with no install, no plugin and no app store approval. The 360° viewer needs WebGL, which is enabled by default on managed Chromebooks and on iPadOS Safari.
No, and this matters in a history classroom. Most of these moments predate photography, so the scenes are researched reconstructions: documented location, dated construction stage, period clothing and technology, rendered as a 360° image. The event, year and coordinates are real; the picture is an illustration built from that evidence.
Yes. The daily challenge is the same five rounds worldwide, so it works as a set task with a comparable result. For asynchronous work, send students a specific moment page — each one has a written account, dating clues and a Q&A they can answer without supervision.
Each round scores distance and date separately, up to 5,000 points, and five rounds make a 25,000-point game. Because the daily challenge is identical for every player that day, scores from different classes are directly comparable.
Players can publish their own maps, and those sit in a separate community library that is quality-screened before it becomes public. If you want to avoid it entirely, keep the class on the authored routes: the daily challenge, the era timeline, event collections, country collections, the quizzes and the trivia bank.
Five rounds take about five minutes and need nothing more than this browser tab. Play today's challenge yourself, then decide which slot it fits.