Box Office Game

Box Office Game picks a weekend out of cinema history and shows you its chart with the titles removed. The board lists five ranks with everything except the names: the weekend gross, the running total, how many weeks each film had been out, and its position the week before: a bracketed number for the returning entries, N for the new arrivals. Each correct title is worth 200 points, and a counter tracks the ten misses you are allowed, with a x20 multiplier noted beside it.

1. Read the date above the chart. It anchors everything else.
2. Study the columns before guessing: an N in last week's rank means a new release, a bracketed number means the film is climbing or falling.
3. Type a film into the search field and submit; a correct title locks into its rank for 200 points.
4. Spend your ten misses carefully. They are the only budget in the game.

Because the numbers are a story if you can read them. A film in its fifth week still holding the top five, a new entry opening above an incumbent, a gross that halves week over week. The chart describes a summer without naming it, and dating the weekend from the shape of the box office is a genuinely different skill from remembering release dates. It rewards a specific kind of film memory: not what was good, but what people actually went to see, which is often not the same list at all.

A correct title fills its row and banks 200 points; a wrong one spends one of ten misses, shown as a running count under the chart. Everything else on the board is given from the start and never changes (grosses, totals, weeks on release and last week's rank), so the information is complete from the first second and the only variable is what you can name. The score accumulates with a bonus multiplier displayed alongside.

Daily weekend

One historical box office weekend per day, with a calendar icon for other dates and a statistics panel.

• Date the weekend first, then recall the season. A late-July 1999 chart is a summer-blockbuster chart, and that narrows the field far faster than guessing titles at random.
• The weeks-on-chart column is the strongest clue. A film in week five at number three was a genuine hit, not a one-weekend opening, which rules out most of what you might guess.
• Start with the new entries marked N. Openings are the most memorable events of a box office weekend, and naming one dates the chart for the rest.