Older Than You Think

Older Than You Think is a free which came first game you play in your browser. Two museum labels hang on a gallery wall, say the fax machine and the American Civil War, or Oxford University and Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, and you tap the one that is older. Then comes the reveal: both dates drop onto a brass timeline, the older label gets its FIRST tab, and a short "wait, really?" fact tells you why. It is a history trivia game about the things you thought you knew: inventions, companies, buildings, books, films, songs, famous people and events, from the Great Pyramid to Wordle.

A run is sixteen pairs that ramp from obvious to counterintuitive. The first rooms of the museum are warm-ups, then the pairs get closer, and the last rooms hold the ones almost everybody gets wrong: Nokia is older than the telephone, Abraham Lincoln was born before Belgium existed, and the Caesar salad is younger than Paramount Pictures. Every visit plays all sixteen pairs, so everyone gets to the surprises; a wrong pick, or letting the 5.5-second fuse between the labels burn down, ends your streak. The visit card at the end shows how many you got right, your best streak, your average answer time and the pair you fell for.

Every date comes from Wikidata, and each label shows its source and what its date means: founded, patented, first published, born. The pool holds more than 500 items in 600 pairs, every date was cross-checked against Wikipedia, and anything whose date is disputed or depends on a convention was left out, so each pair has one honest answer. Where a date is approximate, as with the Great Pyramid, the label says "c." and the pair is only used when the gap is far bigger than the uncertainty. Pairs whose order follows from a link, like a person and their own invention, are never asked.

Scoring rewards knowledge and nerve. A right answer earns 100 to 200 points depending on how tricky the pair is, plus up to 50 for answering quickly, multiplied by your streak: ×1.25 for the second right answer in a row, rising to ×3 from the ninth, so one miss late in a run costs more than it seems and lucky guesses rarely add up. Misses never take points away. Play casually as often as you like, or take a ranked attempt for the leaderboards of our competitive games; ranked runs are verified by replaying them on our servers. On Gamefinity everyone's casual run of the day deals the same sixteen pairs, so after each reveal you also see how many of today's players got it right.

It plays the same on any screen: tap a label on a phone or tablet, click it with a mouse, or press the up and down arrows (or 1 and 2) on a keyboard, with Space to move on after a reveal. A full visit takes about a minute and a half, which makes it one of our quick games and a natural fit with our other quiz games. It is also one of our casual games for adults, and you will find more to play among our mobile games and PC games.