History Game

History Game is a timeline challenge: each turn you get a card for a famous event, such as the Magna Carta, the first powered airplane flight or the Moon landing, and you have to place it in the right spot on a growing timeline. Play this history game online free in your browser, with no download or sign-up, on a laptop, a Chromebook or a phone. It works well as a quick warm-up for students and as a test of how well you really know which came first.

How to play

A run starts with one event already on the timeline. The earliest events sit at the top and the latest at the bottom.

• Read the new card. It shows a drawn icon, the event’s name and a one-line description, but never the date.
• Tap the gap where you think it belongs: above an event if it happened earlier, below if it happened later. With a keyboard, the arrow keys pick a gap and Enter places the card.
• The card then shows its real year and a short fact. If you placed it wrong, it moves to its correct spot so the timeline always stays in order.
• Events from the same year count as correct on either side of each other.
• Each correct placement scores 1 point and adds to your streak. A mistake resets the streak, and three mistakes end the run.

Some very old dates are approximate and are marked “c.” for circa, for example c. 2560 BCE for the Great Pyramid of Giza. They count as that year for ordering, and no two approximate events sit close enough together to make the order a coin toss. Gutenberg’s printing press, marked c. 1440, is accepted anywhere from 1436 to 1450.

Game modes

• Classic: all 152 events in a random order. Keep placing cards until you make three mistakes, or clear the whole deck.
• Era decks: seven themed decks of about 20 events each: Ancient world, Middle Ages, Age of exploration, Inventions, US history, World history 1900s and Space age. Clear the deck with fewer than three mistakes to win it.
• Daily challenge: a 16-card deck that is the same for everyone on the same day, so you can compare scores with classmates or friends. A new deck appears each day.

Your best score for every mode and era, your longest streak and your daily results are saved in your browser, so they are still there next time.

Tips for a higher score

• Anchor on dates you know cold. Most people know 1492, 1776 and 1969. Once those are on the timeline, every other card only has to be compared with its neighbors.
• Think in centuries first. Ask which century an event belongs to before you worry about the exact year. That alone settles most placements.
• Use cause and effect. A war’s start comes before its armistice, a patent before the product it made possible, and a launch before a landing.
• Read the facts. The fact shown after each card often mentions a related date or person that helps with a later card.
• Watch BCE dates. Before the Common Era, bigger numbers are older, so 490 BCE comes before 399 BCE.
• Learn one era at a time. If Classic feels hard, play the era decks until the order of each period feels natural.

FAQ

Is History Game free to play?

Yes. It is completely free, with no account and nothing to install. Start a new run whenever you like.

How many events are there?

There are 152 events, from the unification of ancient Egypt to the launch of the James Webb Space Telescope. We stuck to well-established dates and avoided events whose dates historians still argue about.

Is it good for students and classrooms?

It is built to work on school laptops and Chromebooks with no sign-in. The daily deck is the same for everyone, which makes it easy to run as a short class challenge, and every card ends with a fact worth remembering.

What happens when I place a card wrong?

You lose one of your three lives, your streak resets to zero, and the card slides into its correct place with its real year, so the timeline is always right for the next card.

Does it work on a phone?

Yes. Tap a gap to place a card and tap Next to continue. The timeline scrolls inside its own box, so the page does not move while you play.

Like this kind of challenge? Try our Trivia game for multiple-choice questions on history and more, or test your map skills with the Geography Game.