About
Timely Puzzles is a free set of short daily history games. Each takes a few minutes, and every answer comes with the sources behind it.
The games
There are 14 daily games, with new puzzles every day at midnight Pacific time:
- Real or Fake History?
- Which Came First?
- Guess the Old Price
- Who Am I?
- Spot the Anachronism
- Pin the Event
- Guess the Year
- Who Said It?
- What Is This Patent?
- Mystery Object
- What Happened Next?
- Daily Cryptogram
- Daily Mini Mystery
- Where in History?
There is also one weekly game, Would You Survive?. It's a new scenario each week built from real historical records, showing how people like you actually fared. Missed a day? Every past puzzle is in the archive, with its answers.
How we check facts
Every puzzle is built from published sources: encyclopedia articles, original texts (for example on Project Gutenberg), museum and archive records, government data such as USPS postage rates, U.S. Department of Labor minimum-wage history and EIA gas prices, patent records, and published studies. Before a puzzle goes live, each fact is checked against the text of its source. If we can't verify something, it doesn't run. After you answer, the sources are linked so you can read more.
Images
Patent drawings come from U.S. patent documents, which are in the public domain, and we crop them so they don't give the answer away. Mystery Object photos come from The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Open Access collection (CC0), and each one is credited on its puzzle. Maps use OpenFreeMap tiles with OpenStreetMap data. The logo and game icons are our own.
Privacy
There are no accounts and no sign-up. Your streaks and stats are saved only in your own browser's local storage; clearing this site's data resets them. We don't use analytics, ads or tracking cookies. The map games load their map software from unpkg.com and map tiles from OpenFreeMap, and Mystery Object photos load from The Met. Those services receive the normal web requests your browser makes to show them.
Contact and corrections
Spotted a mistake, or have an idea for a puzzle? Email hello@timelypuzzles.com. If a fact is wrong, send the puzzle date and a source, and we'll fix it and update the answer page.