Guess the year, travel through time
Seven moments from history, each stripped of its date, and one question about every one of them: when did this happen? Type a year between 1 AD and today, and the closer you land, the further your traveller walks through the eras. Seven guesses add up to a journey out of seven hundred.
Eraly never asks which year something was, only whether you can corner it.
Landing within a decade of a reign or a war is a different skill from recalling the exact figure, and the scoring is built to reward the cornering rather than the memory.
Each day brings the same seven moments to everyone playing. An image or a short scene appears, and the only prompt is the year it belongs to. Nothing in the picture is labelled, so the evidence is whatever you recognise: a uniform, a machine, a skyline, the way a photograph was printed. The set deliberately crosses centuries, which means a run cannot be carried by one period you happen to know well.
A guess is scored by how far the year sits from the truth. Hitting it exactly pays 100; a few years out pays 85; the next band 60; a rough placement 30; anything else 10. The bands are generous on purpose, because the game is about placing a moment in a century rather than reciting a date. Seven of them make a maximum of 700, and a journey that never lands inside a decade still ends with something on the board.
Every moment comes with a twenty-five second clock and a single field for a year. Typing four digits takes a second; deciding which four takes the rest. A defensive guess early can be replaced while time remains, which makes the last ten seconds a negotiation between the date you first thought of and the one you can defend. Guesses outside 1 AD to today are refused, and a refusal does not cost points.
Points are drawn as a walk. A pixel figure moves along a road that runs from the first century to the present, and the distance covered is the score. Because the road is chronological rather than numeric, a bad guess in one century and a good one in another pull the traveller to visibly different places, which reads faster than a running total. At the end of the seventh moment, wherever the figure stands is the journey.
The daily journey is a single shared set, so totals from the same day mean something. Once it is finished, the game keeps a second door open: an endless mode that returns the moments you saw longest ago before serving new ones. It changes what the game is asking, from a fair comparison to practice with your own memory, and it is the reason a player can keep going after the day's seven are spent.
02
Recognition, a rough sense of period, and four digits typed in time.
The input is four digits and the answer is a number. There is nothing to phrase and nothing to spell, which keeps the round to the length of a thought.
Being a few years out still pays 85, and being within a rough era pays 30. A guess you can defend beats a blank field every time.
The sets mix inventions, portraits, buildings and events rather than staying inside one syllabus. Familiarity with a single century will not carry seven rounds.
The figure walks the road after each guess, so a weak moment is visible immediately. You can see the journey stall before the total tells you.
The endless mode deals what you saw longest ago first. It is a way to find out which dates actually stuck rather than which ones felt familiar.
The journey ends with one number out of seven hundred and a position on the road. Sharing it does not leak the moments or spoil the set for anyone else.
03
Four moves, seven times.
A scene appears without a caption. The clock starts once it is on screen, so the first seconds are for recognition, not reading.
Enter the year you think it happened, anywhere from 1 AD to today, and press enter to lock it in.
The true year is revealed and the guess is scored in one of five bands. The traveller takes that many steps along the road.
After the last moment the journey closes at a total out of 700. The road shows where you stopped, and the next set waits until tomorrow.
04
Three habits from people who walk the road daily.
I anchor on a treaty or a reign I am certain of, then move the guess a decade either way. It is the same method I teach, which is why the class keeps borrowing it.
The revisited moments are the useful ones. Anything I missed twice goes into a note, and the second miss is usually a century out rather than a few years.
We post totals without saying which moments came up. It keeps the set unspoiled and still tells you whether somebody had a good day.
05
Scoring bands, the daily set and what happens after it.
One field, four digits and a road that starts in the first century. The day's moments are already waiting in the tab you have open.
Walk the road