HistoryGuesser

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    Timeline guesser

    A timeline guesser is a dating exercise dressed as a game. You are given a moment in history as a 360° scene and asked to slide it to the right point on the timeline — anywhere from 3000 BC to this year — using only what is in front of you.

    How it works

    1. Step 1

      Read the scene for period evidence: materials, tools, dress, transport, writing.

    2. Step 2

      Slide to a year. Century arrows jump you through the deep past quickly.

    3. Step 3

      Confirm the place on the map, and see how far off the timeline you were.

    Play an era end to end

    If you want to get properly good at dating, the era runs are the way: five scenes drawn from a single period, so you build a feel for what that century actually looked like instead of jumping from Rome to the 1960s and back.

    There is also a full timeline of periods to read through, each with the moments we have scenes for.

    How close counts as close

    Year scoring falls away smoothly rather than all at once, so being a decade out in the twentieth century and a century out in antiquity are treated as comparable achievements. The ancient world is genuinely harder to date and the scoring says so.

    Ways to play

    Questions

    What year range does the timeline cover?
    3000 BC through to the present. Years before zero are written as BC in the game and in every reveal.
    Can I guess only the year?
    Every round asks for the place as well, but the two are scored separately — you can do very well on dating alone.

    The same game, other ways in