About Zeitguessr
Every day there are 5 historical photographs. For each one you say where it was taken by dropping a pin, and when by setting a range of years. The two are scored separately, so you can finish a day knowing you read the places well and the dates badly.
Place
Scored on how far your pin lands from the truth, up to 1000 points a round. Anything within 25 km counts as exact — historical photographs rarely pin down better than a district, and demanding a street would punish you for genuinely recognising the place. From there the score falls away with distance: the right city scores near the maximum, the right country scores well, the right continent about a third, and the wrong continent nothing.
Period
This is the part that is not like other games. You do not pick a year — you pick a range you are confident the photograph falls inside, anywhere between 1840 and 2020.
- A range that misses the true year is worth nothing, however close it came.
- A range that contains the true year is worth up to 1000, but the wider you make it the less it pays. Past about 60 years it is worth almost nothing, so hedging across a whole century earns you no more than not guessing at all.
So the interesting decision is not "which year" but "how sure am I". Being honest about uncertainty beats guessing precisely and missing, and it also beats playing safe.
Hints
You get 3 hints for the whole game, spendable on any round. Each costs points off the axis it helps, so take one when you are stuck rather than when you are merely unsure.
- Continent −250 PlaceNarrows the world down to one continent.
- Half-century −250 PeriodNarrows the date to a fifty-year band.
- Photographic process −200 PeriodReveals the medium — daguerreotype, black and white, colour film, digital.
- Caption fragment −150 Place/−150 PeriodThe archive caption, with places and dates redacted.
A hint is only offered when the answer is actually on file. You are never charged to be told there is no caption.
Where the photographs come from
All of them come from Wikimedia Commons, and every one is public domain or openly licensed. The title, photographer, source and licence are shown once you have guessed — before that they are held back, because the filename usually gives the whole answer away.
Photographs are chosen by a pass that actually looks at them, so survey diagrams, studio portraits and plain interiors are kept out: they are dated and located, but there is nothing in them to place. Where an archive has printed the town and the year onto the scan itself, that corner stays covered until you have guessed.
A new one every day
The puzzle changes at midnight UTC and everyone gets the same one. Your progress saves as you go, so a reload or a phone locking mid-round does not cost you the day.