Terra Tempus Daily #144 · October 22, 2026

These are the 5 rounds every player got on October 22, 2026, with the answers and the history behind them. This day is finished, so nothing here spoils a puzzle you can still play. Today’s Daily Challenge is a different five events.

Not enough completed runs on this day to report an average without singling out an individual player’s score. We publish one from 5 finishers up.

Round 1

Battle of Bosworth Field

1485 · Medieval

Why there: Leicestershire's central Midland location sat astride the routes between Richard III's northern strongholds and Henry Tudor's Welsh landing, making these fields the natural meeting point where the two armies converged.

Why then: Decades of dynastic bloodletting in the Wars of the Roses had thinned the Plantagenet line and shaken loyalty to Richard III, so a single battle in 1485, decided by defectors like the Stanleys, could topple a crown and install the Tudors.

The Battle of Bosworth Field (1485) ended the Wars of the Roses.
King Richard III was killed, the last English king to die in battle.
Henry Tudor's victory established the Tudor dynasty as Henry VII.

Round 2

Great Smog of London

1952 · 20th Century

Why there: London sat in the Thames river basin where cold air pools, and its millions of tightly packed homes and factories all burned coal for heat, so an atmospheric inversion could trap enormous volumes of smoke over the dense capital.

Why then: Post-war Britain still relied almost entirely on cheap, dirty domestic coal for heating, and only after this disaster did pollution science and public outrage mature enough to drive the 1956 Clean Air Act.

This was the Great Smog of London in December 1952.
Initial counts put deaths near 4,000; present-day estimates reach about 12,000.
It directly led to the UK Clean Air Act of 1956.

Round 3

Battle of the Maureaco Fields

451 CE · Antiquity

The Battle of the Catalaunian Plains (451 CE) pitted the Roman general Aetius and his Visigothic allies against Attila the Hun.
The Visigothic king Theodoric I was killed during the battle.
The clash halted Attila's westward advance into Gaul.

Round 4

Battle of Saint Gotthard

1664 · Early Modern

Why there: The battle took place along the Raab River near St. Gotthard in western Hungary because this waterway formed a natural defensive line and a contested frontier on the Ottoman army's route toward Vienna and Habsburg heartlands.

Why then: By 1664 the renewed Ottoman offensive under grand vizier Köprülü collided with a Habsburg realm able to rally a rare pan-European coalition, including French and German contingents, marking a moment when the empire's eastward-pressing power could finally be matched in open field.

A Habsburg-led allied army defeated the Ottoman forces in 1664.
The battle was fought along a river on the contested frontier.
The subsequent peace treaty disappointed many Christian commanders despite the victory.

Round 5

Withheld from the archive

This round was played, but we do not republish it here. Recent events involving mass civilian casualties are excluded from our public archive under our content policy, whatever their place in the day’s puzzle.

Every Daily Challenge is five real events, one from each of five different eras, identical for every player, scored up to 10,000 points a round on how close you land in space and in time. Read how to play, see where the events come from, or play today’s.