I wonder if anyone plays this excellent game? It shows you an image and you have to work out when and where the photo was taken. The images are typically of prominent events or places and because there is no time limit I like to play detective and try my best to work out each answer. Although reverse image searching would obviously be cheating!
In today’s daily game I manage a score of 42,286 out of a possible 50,000.
Fun game!
For today’s daily it said I got 9949 out of 10,000.
There are 5 photos in each challenge, each guess is scored up to 10,000. So 4 more to go!
I must be missing something because I can’t figure out how to set the year I want to guess. It just says “1962” underneath the map and clicking on it doesn’t change anything.
You drag the ‘button’ underneath the ‘1962’. Move it to the right and the year increases; to the left, the year decreases.
Ah. Somehow it didn’t occur to me that it was a slider. My first attempt at playing the game gave me a B&W photo of suffragettes protesting in front of the White House but I couldn’t figure out how to set the date.
46,783 for today’s challenge - but that was talking a lot of time and using Google to do it as a sort of investigation because I find it a lot of fun if you have the patience.
For the second picture (of the convoy) I was a bit confused at first because they were Cadillacs and thought US but quickly realised from the cars, number plates and road markings that we were in Europe and this was a convoy of hearses. I tried looking up the police outrider uniforms around Europe - I couldn’t find a match but the Dutch uniforms were not too different. Then I spotted a road sign that had ‘A2’ on it. Quick look of Google Maps and indeed the Netherlands has ‘A’ roads. I spotted the A2 and the markings were very similar (those turn arrows were identical). So I moved the man to a bend on the A2 that looked similar near a junction. And that was it! There’s the sign! There are some white boxes! Very lucky there! The A2 is a relatively short road that goes to Eindhoven so I looked up “Eindhoven hearse convoy” and saw a news headline about bodies from MH17 being transported to military barracks near Eindhoven! Very satisfactory.
The “Tibet” one was impossible, although I couldn’t see mountains in the background so I suspected we could be in a different country. Not much sign that was India though.
I thought maybe I could find that tall building in the picture of what were clearly the recent floods in Valencia (the number plates confirmed we were in Spain), but Street View let me down but I was only a mile or two away.
The one in New York with the road signs was obviously easy to pinpoint but trying to work out what that crowd was there for was tricky, I just couldn’t work out was it was. It looked 1960’s but not a moon landing celebration. Should have just gone with the middle of the decade but my rule of thumb is that a decade’s fashion tends to lag a couple of years behind depending on the country so went late sixties.
I’ve started playing (after seeing Hank Green jump from Connections to Timeguesser in a Youtube vlog). It’s more fun than late stage Wordle. And can be educational.
After trying to identify the photos without research, I settled on “research till I’m bored”. That’s usually 5 minutes per image, but sometimes more.
I’ve been trying to learn visual clues for the decades. Wikipedia says the iPhone was introduced in 2007, so if someone is holding a smartphone, I’ve got a rough notion. It seems most cars from the 1930s still had spoked wheels and freestanding headlights, but I’m terrible on dating auto styles.
Lapel width? Hemlines? No ideas, but I’m trying to learn.
Mobile phones are definitely useful for anything in the 21st century. Fashion, hair and cars are good for post-ww2 but you have to take into account the location as some parts of the world were slower to adopt styles and technology. I do struggle with 1910s-1930s.
I chose not to google anything. I was pretty good for the most part, but missed a couple of tricky ones by thousands of miles.
I don’t know if I’ve got lucky my first 2 games but this game makes me feel like a genius. My first game I was off by 3, 6, 63, 150 and 3500 miles, and 1, 3, 6, 8, 12 years. Second game I was off by 368 meters (!), 3, 12, 158, and 6000 miles and 2, 3, 6, 10, 16 years. So I geographically botched one question each game but the rest were really dead on. No googling and not spending too much time on them.
In one, based on what appeared to be Italian writing and 60s Italian style I guessed Italy but it was actually Brazil, but there are Italian enclaves in Brazil so it felt like a bit of a trick question.
Some of the close distances were a little lucky – I knew the city but got lucky kind of randomly picking the area. Somehow I saw a generic road side stop with cyrillic writing and arid mountains figured it had to be in one of the various -stan countries but got lucky that I randomly picked a spot in Turkmenistan that happened to be 60 miles away.
I also got lucky on the dates a few times. Style, cars, etc suggested 70s to me, and I guessed maybe 1974 and got lucky it was only 2 or 3 years away, but I could’ve easily been 6 or 7.
I dig this though. Combining time and location as two axes is fun.
Had a laugh with the daily game today. The first image showed the name of a museum (which I googled), but as for an approximate year I could only guess from cars/clothes/fonts. And didn’t come close.
The answer made me smile because I’d overlooked a tiny clue.
——
(The submarine)
And Timeguessr has forced me to learn the basic differences among Korean, Chinese, and Japanese text. In the past I could sorta intuit, but I’m better now.
I’ve played a few games and so far the game has been very Euro centric. I’d say about about 75% of the answers are in Europe. I’m not sure if that’s by design (probably) or a coincidence. Which works for me – I can differentiate much better among European languages and styles than Asian or African ones. It would be pretty hard for me to pin down anything specific in Subsaharan Africa.
35,385/ 50,000 today.
I’m not sure how others do, but that was a solid round for me.
I think it exclusively picks from Wikimedia Commons so if the bulk of those images are European then it may skew to that (though I don’t know). Small claim to fame here: one of my images on Wikimedia Commons has featured in the daily game - though it was taken in Panama.
Good fun, just snagged a 9956
I just tried this for the first time…and I scored 9786! A photo in Innsbruck, Austria in
1935 – I was 682 meters and 2 years off. Wow!
The time penalties are a little steep I think.
Ha, just got a 12 on location, missed by 18400km
That is nearly the antipodal distance of Earth, as far apart as you can be.
I agree the time penalties are a little harsh. Unless there’s a specific event it’s referencing, like perhaps an olympics event or a particular war, it can be hard to place the years. You can guess based on the style or cars or some other clue, but often it can be hard to pin it down and I don’t think being 6 or 7 years off should be punished very much.