A daily history puzzle. Five hints about one historical event, hardest first. Name it in as few as you can.
The first hint is deliberately hard — often hard enough to feel unfair. Each one after it is easier. You can take all five, and the fifth is the easiest, but it is not the answer: it should be gettable by anyone who read the four before it, and it still makes you supply the name.
Hints and guesses are separate. You have five of each. Taking a hint to think does not cost you a shot, and firing blind does not buy you information. The round ends when the guesses run out.
There is no menu of possible answers, and there never will be. Seeing the options turns remembering into recognising, which is the whole game. You type what you think it is and we work out what you meant — spelling is forgiven, word order does not matter, and most common names for an event are accepted. Remembering is not forgiven, because that is the point.
Two puzzles a day. The Daily is meant to be winnable. The Deep Cut is for people who want to be beaten. They are not easy and hard versions of the same thing — they are different puzzles, and the second one is optional.
Every factual claim in a hint has a source behind it. Where an account is disputed or apocryphal, the hint says so — "legend has it", "often credited" — rather than repeating a good story as fact. The stories that make the best hints are disproportionately the ones that are not quite true, so this is a rule rather than an instinct.
Hints state facts, not framing. Contested history gets described, not adjudicated.
Hints are written from scratch. Nothing is pasted from an encyclopedia — facts are not copyrightable but article text is licensed, and borrowing the prose would put a licence on ours.
Images are public domain or Creative Commons, with the photographer or collection credited on the results screen. A puzzle cannot be published without its licence recorded.
Anyone can play, from anywhere, and there is no region setting. But difficulty is judged against what a general audience in the United States is likely to have encountered, because that is where most players are. It is a well-founded guess rather than a measurement, and it will be wrong about you sometimes — most reliably if you are not American.
The game is in English and the guess field understands English.
The whole game works signed out, and it always will. Your streak and stats live in this browser. An account, when accounts open, will only carry them to another device — it will not unlock anything.
Sometimes a hint gives the answer away, or the guess field refuses something that is plainly right. Both are our defects, and the second one costs you a guess, which makes it the worse of the two.
There is a Report a problem item in the menu on every screen. It sends the puzzle, what you typed, and whatever you want to say. It is read.
Made by ShelfControl. What this site collects.