AnnoGameDaily dossier · A history guessing game

Friday, July 17, 2026Puzzle №198
Five events · 500 points

Five moments. One timeline.

Each day, five moments from history. Place each one on the timeline. The closer your guess, the higher your score. New events daily — the same puzzle for everyone.

How to play

  1. 01Read one historical event at a time.
  2. 02Place it on the timeline from 3000 BC to today.
  3. 03Earn up to 100 points for each close guess.
  4. 04Study the real date, then move to the next event.
The past is larger than a list of dates

A history guessing game for five minutes of better perspective

AnnoGame is a free history guessing game about sequence, scale, and surprise. Instead of choosing from four answers, you place real events on a continuous timeline. The daily puzzle gives every player the same five moments, moving from recognizable landmarks to dates that ask for a deeper historical instinct. Each guess becomes a score, then an explanation, so curiosity matters as much as recall.

The experience is designed to feel complete without an account. Pick a nickname, finish five events, compare a non-spoiler result, and return tomorrow. Your official score, streak, averages, best game, badges, and history remain in your browser. Practice mode is available after the daily history game and stays separate from the result everyone shares.

Return to today's dossier
Field note 01

How this history guessing game works

AnnoGame keeps the rules visible and the interaction direct. This history guessing game is not a multiple-choice quiz and it does not ask you to memorize a list before playing. Every round starts with one event, one open timeline, and your existing sense of sequence.

  1. 01

    Read the historical moment

    Read the clue for what it says and what it implies. Technologies, institutions, people, empires, and social movements all provide indirect anchors. A clue may suggest an era through vocabulary or context, but it never prints the answer year before you commit.

  2. 02

    Place it on the timeline

    Enter a year directly, drag the range control, use the six buttons for ±1, ±10, and ±100, or move with the keyboard. The controls stay synchronized from 3000 BC through the present, making broad exploration and precise adjustment equally comfortable.

  3. 03

    See how close you landed

    Locking a guess reveals the real year, your distance, a score from 0 to 100, and a short verdict. An exponential curve rewards precision without turning every imperfect answer into failure, while older events receive more historical breathing room.

  4. 04

    Turn feedback into context

    Open Learn more for a compact explanation of why the event matters, then continue. The answer becomes a reference point for later rounds. By the fifth reveal, the history guessing game has produced both a score and five new anchors.

Field note 02

Build a mental timeline, not a pile of trivia

Many quizzes test names and facts in isolation. A history guessing game tests relationships: did a scientific breakthrough occur before a political revolution, how far apart were two empires, and does an event belong near the beginning or the end of a century? Those comparisons build a framework that makes later reading easier to organize.

The timeline is labeled Antiquity, Classical, Medieval, and Modern as orientation, not as a claim that every region followed one European periodization. Events come from many places, and the labels are broad navigation aids. The real learning happens in the date, context, and connections you carry into the next clue.

Immediate reveal closes the learning loop while the guess is still vivid. If you place the first powered flight decades too early, the correct year sits beside your estimate and the difference becomes memorable. The daily history game turns an error into a coordinate instead of hiding it behind a final summary.

AntiquityClassicalMedievalModern
Field note 03

A daily history game built for a shared ritual

A daily history game works because the challenge is shared. Everyone receives the same five events after the Central-Time date changes, so a score has context. You can compare a difficult ancient clue with a friend without revealing its answer, return tomorrow for a fresh set, and let a streak grow from actual completed days rather than repeated sessions.

The formal puzzle is deliberately short. Five rounds are enough to create variety without turning the visit into homework. A complete score takes only a few minutes, yet the result contains five separate judgments about chronology. That rhythm makes AnnoGame useful as a morning brain teaser, a classroom warm-up, or a small evening ritual.

Sharing never includes the event text or answer years. The result card contains the puzzle number, five point values, simple performance symbols, the total, and annogame.app. That gives a group something fair to compare while protecting the discovery for anyone who has not played the daily history game yet.

Field note 04

Practice more without rewriting the daily record

After the official history guessing game, practice mode selects another balanced group of five events. It uses the same year controls, scoring curve, reveals, and explanations, but it never writes to the daily leaderboard or formal statistics. You can experiment, notice weak periods, and make a bad guess without risking the result already attached to today's puzzle number.

Practice is limited to four sessions per Central-Time day, creating twenty optional extra rounds without encouraging endless grinding. The cap keeps the event pool fresh and the daily puzzle central. Your Stats view continues to show only formal games, including the newest first, so progress remains understandable rather than mixed with every rehearsal.

4 sessions daily0 stat changes
Field note 05

Transparent scoring that respects historical distance

The scoring rule is public. Points equal 100 multiplied by an exponential decay based on the absolute year difference. The tolerance is at least thirty years and grows for older events. An exact answer always earns 100, a nearby answer declines smoothly, and a distant guess still communicates how far your mental timeline moved rather than producing only a red cross.

This curve gives the history guessing game a useful emotional range. Bullseye, Remarkable, Sharp, Decent, Off the mark, Way off, and A different century describe performance without pretending that all historical uncertainty is identical. The five round scores add directly to the 500-point total shown in your result and share text.

DifferenceToleranceCurvePoints
0 yearsExacte⁰100
20 yearsModerne⁻ᵈ/³⁰51
100 yearsAnciente⁻ᵈ/ᵗvaries
Field note 06

Editorial standards for a trustworthy history guessing game

A credible history guessing game needs more than memorable trivia. Every event receives a stable ID, a chosen year, a difficulty tier, a clue that avoids leaking the date, and an explanation written after the answer. When historians debate a beginning or ending, AnnoGame adopts one stated convention instead of pretending that every historical process happened in a single uncontested instant.

The event pool crosses regions, centuries, political systems, science, culture, exploration, social movements, and everyday technology. Familiar anchors appear beside deeper cuts so that each set contains an approachable opening and at least one moment that stretches your map. Ancient events receive broader scoring tolerance because a fifty-year miss does not mean the same thing in 2500 BC as it does in the twentieth century.

Historical wording matters as much as arithmetic. Explanations avoid romanticizing conquest or reducing complex societies to a single outsider's arrival. If a clue, date, or description seems misleading, the contact page provides a direct correction route. The archive is a living editorial product, and careful revision is part of the game rather than an admission that history is simple.

Found something we should review? Send a historical correction.

Field note 07

No account required, with a clear local-data boundary

AnnoGame does not require a login for the public history guessing game. The browser creates a random device ID so the leaderboard can update one entry for one date without exposing hardware details. Your full clues, guesses, and game history remain local. Public score responses never include the device ID, and no payment or account controls appear in the first release.

Clearing site data clears the local nickname, history, streak, practice count, and locally unlocked badges. That tradeoff is intentional: low-friction play comes before cross-device identity. The privacy page documents each storage key, and the game continues to work even if the leaderboard or cache is temporarily unavailable.

Privacy policyTerms of serviceStorage policy
Field note 08

History guessing game questions

01How does the history guessing game work?

You receive five historical events and guess the year of each one. Closer placements earn more points, with a maximum of 100 per event and 500 for the complete history guessing game.

02When does the daily puzzle change?

A new shared puzzle begins at midnight in the America/Chicago time zone. Using one authority keeps the puzzle number, streak, leaderboard, and daily event set consistent worldwide.

03Do I need an account?

No. Your nickname, daily history, streak, badges, and device ID stay in this browser. The public leaderboard receives only the nickname, score, round points, puzzle date, and earned badge codes.

04Can I replay today's official puzzle?

The first completed daily result is final for that browser and date. You can reopen the result, copy it again, review the explanations, and enter practice mode without changing the formal score.

05How are BC and AD years handled?

The game stores BC years as negative numbers and AD years as non-negative numbers, then shows a readable suffix. The timeline reaches from 3000 BC to the current year.

06Does practice mode affect my statistics?

Practice uses a separate five-event set and can be played four times per day. It does not change your streak, average, best daily score, game history, or public leaderboard position.

07Can I install AnnoGame on my phone?

On iPhone or iPad, use Safari's Share menu and choose Add to Home Screen. Compatible desktop and Android browsers may offer their own installation prompt through the web app manifest.

Today's archive is open

Where does today belong on your timeline?

Five clues are waiting in the daily archive. Start the same history guessing game as everyone else, place each event with your best intuition, and leave with a clearer mental map of the past.

Play today's history guessing game