Chronophoto

Chronophoto deals one archive photograph per round and asks a single question: what year was this taken? A slider runs from 1900 to 2025 under the image, you drop it where your eye says, and you submit. Five rounds make a game, and the day's puzzle is dated at the top of the screen. A guess of 1930 against a true date of 1918 keeps 242 points out of the 1000 a round can hold.

1. Open the daily game, the date sits top left and the round counter reads Round 1 of 5.
2. Study the photograph: grain, clothing, vehicles, signage, and any caption printed on the image itself.
3. Drag the slider to your year anywhere between 1900 and 2025, then press Submit.
4. Read the true year and your score, then take the next round; five rounds make the day's total.

Because it grades a skill nothing else does: reading a photograph for its decade. Film grain, clothing, vehicle silhouettes, the way a crowd stands. The clues are all there and none of them are labels. The scoring is unforgiving in the right way, since a twelve-year miss costs three quarters of the round, which makes narrowing from "somewhere between the wars" to a specific half-decade the whole game. It reads like GeoGuessr with the map replaced by a timeline.

The reveal is immediate and numeric. The submitted year stays on screen, the true year appears in plain words, for example "PHOTO WAS TAKEN IN 1918", and the slider redraws to show both positions, your guess and the answer, so the size of the error is visible rather than merely stated. Points land under the year and accumulate in a running total across the five rounds.

Daily

Five dated rounds shared by everyone that day, with a statistics panel tracking your history.

Unlimited

Endless rounds outside the daily, listed in the top navigation.

Party

A multiplayer mode for playing the same photographs against other people.

• Read the caption before the image when there is one: a hand-lettered title on the print dates it far more precisely than the scene does.
• Date the technology, not the subject: a horse-drawn scene can be 1950 in a rural county, but the film stock and print quality rarely lie by more than a decade.
• The penalty curve is steep. A twelve-year miss keeps only 242 of 1000, so committing to a half-decade beats hedging in the middle of a slider.