About History Trail
History Trail is a daily quiz where you find where history happened on a globe. Each day brings five questions linked by one theme, and when you finish, the path that history took that day is drawn as a single trail on the map.
How to play
- A new theme with five questions opens every day at 00:00 UTC. Everyone plays the same questions on the same day.
- Read the question, spin the globe and tap where you think it happened to drop a pin. Borders, country names, mountains and coastlines are your clues.
- Confirm to see the answer, the distance, your score and a short story.
- If you're stuck you can open one hint per question, but that question is then worth 80 percent.
- You can play once a day, and if you leave halfway you can pick up where you left off.
Scoring
Each question is worth up to 1,000 points, for a maximum of 5,000 a day. A pin within the question's radius of the answer (usually 100–300 km for a city) gets full marks, and the score falls the further away you are. It falls gently enough that getting the right continent still earns a few hundred points.
Leaderboards and past trails
- Sign in with Google to appear on the day's leaderboard. Rankings are by total score, with faster times breaking ties. The leaderboard shows your Google account name and profile picture; we never receive your email address.
- You can also play without signing in and still see what percentage of today's players you beat.
- "Past trails" shows the answers, stories and leaderboards from the last 14 days. Today's answers appear there tomorrow.
Sharing your result
From the result screen you can save your trail card as an image or copy your score as text. The saved image shows only your taps, so it won't spoil the answers for friends who haven't played yet.
How the questions are made
Each theme picks five events in chronological order, and every question records the references used to check it. Themes go well beyond wars: explorers' routes, the spread of foods, lost imperial capitals and more.
If you spot a mistake or have an idea for a theme, write to pulum0083@gmail.com.
Maps and data
- Satellite imagery: Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics and the GIS User Community
- Borders and country names: OpenStreetMap contributors (served by OpenFreeMap)
- Related film posters and titles: TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB. Film links go to IMDb.
- Land outlines on the result card: Natural Earth
Who makes it
History Trail is made and run independently by luke. Contact: pulum0083@gmail.com