Show HN: Built a daily game where you sort historical events chronologically

45•damiannn•4h ago

Comments

FailMore•3h ago

Nice, I enjoyed it. Fyi I think you should edit the title to be "Show HN: <title>". This will mean it will be on the /show (https://news.ycombinator.com/show) page.

damiannn•3h ago

Thankss! Yeah, good tip.

jordanscales•2h ago

Nice work! I'd consider ditching the AI art though, it was distracting.

damiannn•2h ago

I love those :D took me some time to come up with the custom prompt to make those images have that specific art style, but yeah, I understand that not everyone like s AI art

elpocko•1h ago

Not everyone likes daily games. I hate them. That shouldn't stop you from making a daily game. Ignore the haters.

damiannn•1h ago

well said

sputknick•1h ago

I'll take the other side of this argument: I like the AI art. Easy way to make it more visually engaging

lgcmo•33m ago

I believe pulling art/media from Wikipedia would be cooler and less controversial. I also believe the licensing allows it.

AndrewKemendo•2h ago

I like it! A quality old school learning game, like we had in the 90s

I’m also a huge history guy so anything that helps people understand history better is great

Was the goal just to make this for yourself and see how it goes?

damiannn•1h ago

Yeah basically, I'm very curious to see if people will actually find this wordle-like history game interesting and if they'll stick to it.

But i also often find myself just staring at some of those images and eventually finding more about some of those on the internet.

tdb7893•1h ago

How accurate are these pictures? I feel like I see ideas like this on HN pretty often and the art always gets things wrong. Like all the same clean armor during the first crusade seems doubtful and two swords on horseback just seems wacky. Two swords like that is dumb normally but also how do you control the horse lmao

krapp•1h ago

They're AI generated, so obviously not accurate.

Although we live in a post-truth age and AI generated photos are used in historical and academic contexts now so it doesn't really matter much anymore. The past is just a vibe.

damiannn•1h ago

Agree. My goal wasn’t 100% accuracy so much as capturing the overall feel of the event, more like a collage that includes key people, features and atmosphere of that period.

wwalker2112•1h ago

Very fun. Would you consider putting years on the timeline to match the events up to? I think from an education perspective it would be a great feature! Nice Work!

damiannn•1h ago

That's actually not a bad idea, will definitely consider that.

J0rdanius•1h ago

Neat! I think with more events (~9) and obscure ones it would be more fun. I also think it would be fun to make it possible to play previous days. Bookmarked.

damiannn•1h ago

yeah, i was considering it, but to be honest the only reason i decided to go with 6 event is to make it playable on mobile device with images big enough to see soemthing :D

matt_daemon•1h ago

NYT has a weekly version of this for those interested

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/04/17/upshot/flashb...

damiannn•1h ago

imagine waiting a weeeek... jk :D

steinvakt2•1h ago

This, as well as the NYT game, is heavily inspired by https://www.timdle.com ?

damiannn•1h ago

i was HEAVILY inspired by wordle, wanted to create a daily game with similar mechanics. This concept came to my mind, but yeah, after it came to my mind i checked if something like that already exists and bumped into thing you just posted. UX seemed kinda complicated to my, my idea was to make it as simple as possible, drag & drop, so people can play it while commuting daily (tram, metro, bus), and will take like 2 minutes of their time.

irq-1•50m ago

Should have 5+ puzzles to do on the first day, so people can play enough to remember it. (They can be the same 5 static puzzles.)

defrost•1h ago

Noodling kind of question, Share results / copy to Clipboard both seem to put the same string in the local clipboard:

Hisorty #9 1/3 https://hisorty.app

( the six green squares don't render on HN ) ... which is still a string that can be readily edited.

It's more resources your end to save game results for a specific play and generate a unique checksummed hash key for a third party URL lookup, sure, so I guess the question is how important is it for players to reliably share their results in a manner that is hard than a simple edit to 'cheat' on?

damiannn•1h ago

very good question. My take is that once the result becomes this easy to manipulate, like simply editing the result string, it kinda defeats the purpose of doing so :D . If anyone can do it then it kinda loses meaning and there’s not much point to doing so in the first place :D

snarf21•1h ago

Maybe I missed it but if I don't solve in time, it didn't show me the correct answers.

damiannn•1h ago

There is no timer implemented as far as i know :D , it shouldn't be the case :D

pixel_popping•1h ago

Excellent name!

damiannn•1h ago

thankss!

delichon•1h ago

A fun variation would be to create the cards from social media posts or articles, stripped of dates. It's astonishing how little context the geoguessers need, I expect the same for chronoguessers.

damiannn•51m ago

not a bad idea at all, would be fun :D

Error403agent•48m ago

Fun

damiannn•34m ago

thanks

coder97•33m ago

Nice game. I can see myself playing this daily.

How do you plan to feed the questions? Is it with AI or manual work?

damiannn•27m ago

AI - I created a custom prompt to generate those event, so that the difficulty is just right, not that easy, but not that hard also. Took some iterations to polish it, now it kinda feels just right.

Same with the image generation - custom prompt so they have this specific style.

emberfiend•31m ago

cool game, maybe consider removing the eternally looping animation in the header, it's pretty visually distracting

MrDunham•27m ago

Or loop once/twice... it's a fun effect, but when endless I agree that it's distracting

damiannn•26m ago

yeah, you're not the first mentioning this. I was just so proud of that name + animation combo I had to make sure it's visible all the time xdd but yeah, will consider dropping it / adjusting intensity

everyone•27m ago

awesome! but the one per day thing kills it for me.. I want to play like 10 in a row and then forget about it for a few months.

damiannn•23m ago

got you man, had this problem with wordle too, but there's something nice about being only able to play it once a day. daily ritual while drinking your morning coffee and then sharing it with ur family/friend of course :D :D

SkepticalWhale•20m ago

Very cool! Consider adding a wikipedia link to each card after the game is over.

damiannn•14m ago

thanks for suggestion, definitely gonna implement something like that soon

techsystems•16m ago

Cool, I would play this

Hopefully EMEA isn't all of history /s

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Show HN: Built a daily game where you sort historical events chronologically

Comments

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