Timeline: hold one card and find the gap it belongs in
Release Year asked you one question about a date: earlier or later. Timeline asks the hard version. A row of cards is already on the table in year order, each showing the year it came out. You are handed one more card with its year behind a question mark, and every gap in that row is a button. Before Jaws? Between Jaws and Pac-Man? After Nirvana? There are nine wrong answers and one right one, and the row gets longer and the gaps get tighter with every card you place.
How a run works
Today’s run is ten placements, the same ten for everyone, 100 points each. Three hearts, and a wrong placement spends one, so a run can end before the tenth card. A card you place correctly locks into the row, which now reads in order and one card longer. A card you get wrong is shown in its true place in red and then discarded, so the row only ever grows with cards that belong where they sit — you learn where it went without the row telling you a lie for the rest of the run.
The endless run deals for as long as the hearts hold out and keeps your best streak for every theme. A table cannot grow past eleven cards, because that is the width the row was proved readable at on a phone; when it fills, a fresh row opens and your streak carries straight across. On a computer, ← and → walk the gaps and Enter places the card.
Why exactly one gap is right
A card whose year is already on the table would have two honest answers, and the game’s one promise is that exactly one gap is right. So a deck never deals two cards from the same year. The price is that Shrek, Spirited Away and The Fellowship of the Ring never meet in one run — they are all 2001 — and the row reads the same either way, so you lose nothing. The years themselves are the 109 entries Release Year is built on: films, games, albums, consoles, 1937 to 2023, every year checked against a source that is named in the card’s own reveal.
Pick a theme and you get a different row: Everything, Films, Video games, Music, or Consoles & tech, each with its own daily draw, its own saved progress and its own share link. A run you leave half-finished comes back where it was. Every day is kept, so you can play yesterday’s, read any day back on the answers page, or work through the archive.