Whenabouts

Whenabouts is a free daily timeline game you play in your browser. Each card is a thing with a hidden year, like bubble wrap, the Oreo, Harvard University or Tetris, and under it sits a short timeline of four other things whose years you can see. Tap the gap where the card belongs. It slides into its real place, its year lands, and a short fact tells you something you probably did not know. Whereabouts is where something is; whenabouts is roughly when, and that is the whole game. It is a history timeline game about inventions, foods, toys, films, songs, landmarks, companies, people and events, from the ancient world to last year.

A day is eight cards, and everyone on Gamefinity gets the same eight. Each card has its own timeline, picked around it, so every question is a squeeze: the Oreo goes somewhere between the first powered flight and the Panama Canal, Nintendo somewhere among Coca-Cola, the first modern Olympics and the telephone. You have 20 seconds to decide. The small line on each card says what its year means, such as invented, first sold, opened or released, so every question has one honest answer, and things whose dates are disputed are left out.

Scoring is simple. The right gap earns 100 points, one gap off earns 30, and anything further earns nothing, for a best day of 800. Nothing is ever taken away, and a miss only costs that one card. When two players tie, the one who decided faster ranks higher on the leaderboards, so a quick, sure placement is worth something too. At the end you see all eight of today's cards on one timeline, each marked right, close or wrong, and a share card with one square per card.

Every year was checked against Wikidata, the open database behind Wikipedia, or against a cited source where Wikidata does not state it. The cards come back slowly: the daily works through hundreds of questions before a card returns, so a regular player meets something new every day. It is one of our daily games, and it sits well beside our other quiz games such as Older Than You Think, which asks which of two things came first, while Whenabouts asks where one thing fits among four.

It plays the same on any screen. On a phone or tablet, tap the gap; with a mouse, click it, and the gap under the pointer lights up; on a keyboard, move between the gaps with the up and down arrows and place the card with Enter. A full day takes about two minutes, which makes it one of our quick games and one of our casual games for adults, and you will find more among our mobile games and PC games.