How to play Terra Tempus

1. Read the clue

Each round opens with a few sentences describing a real event — what happened, and enough texture to reason from. The clue never names the place or the year outright; the whole game is working those out from what the description implies. Some rounds ask only for the place, some only for the time, and most ask for both.

2. Guess where

Drop a pin on the world map. Your geography score comes from the great-circle distance between your pin and the true location, scaled to the region you are playing: a World run is more forgiving than a run narrowed to Europe, because the search space is bigger.

3. Guess when

Then place the event in time on the era timeline, which runs from antiquity to the present across six eras: Antiquity, Medieval, Early Modern, the 19th century, the 20th century and Modern. You start out answering with a time bandrather than a single year — you pick the stretch of history the event belongs to, and you get full credit if the answer falls inside it. Exact-year entry is not the beginner mode: it unlocks on the “when” axis once your mastery reaches Adept, and the Daily Challenge always uses bands, for everyone, regardless of rank.

How scoring works

A round is worth up to 10,000 points. When it asks for both answers, that splits 6,000 for the place and 4,000 for the time; when it asks for only one, that axis is rescaled to the full 10,000. Nothing is all-or-nothing — points slide with how close you land, so a near miss still scores.

Answering quickly adds a speed bonus of up to 2,500 points on top of the round total. It is deliberately excluded from the ranked leaderboard, which sums accuracy only: a fast tap can never buy rank.

Hints are optional and they cost you. Narrowing the map to a continent caps that round’s place score at 80% of its maximum, narrowing the time to a half-century does the same to the time score, and revealing an extra fact costs a flat 500 points. As your mastery grows the hints fade out on their own — the training wheels are meant to come off.

Daily Challenge rules

A new Daily Challenge goes live at midnight UTC. It is five rounds, one drawn from each of five different eras, and it is the same five rounds for every player that day — which is what makes comparing scores mean anything. You get one scored run; there are no second tries. When you finish you can share an emoji grid of how each round went, which gives nothing away about the answers.

Completing the Daily on consecutive days builds a streak. Missing a single day does not necessarily end it: you earn a streak freeze every five days (up to two banked), and a freeze silently covers one missed day. Two missed days in a row resets the streak.

The other two modes

Region & Era Play is the same puzzle without the once-a-day limit: choose one of five regions — Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa or Oceania — or World for all of them, choose an era, and play as many five-round runs as you like. Mastery is tracked per axis across five rungs: Novice, Apprentice, Adept, Expert and Master. The higher you climb, the harder the mix gets.

Geo Drills is the map-learning half: countries, capitals, flags, and states and provinces, drilled in short sessions and scheduled by spaced repetition so each item comes back right before you would have forgotten it. It is the fastest way to make the history rounds easier.

Where the events come from

Every event in the game is a real one. Coordinates and dates are sourced from Wikidata; the clues and explanations are written by us. The full pipeline, including what we have and have not finished reviewing, is on the sourcing and methodology page.