Where in Time is a free daily history-guessing game. Each day you get five 360° panoramas from across human history. Drop a pin on Earth for where the scene takes place. Pick a year for when. Both get scored on a curve. Like Wordle, but for history.
The mechanic is borrowed from GeoGuessr; the twist is the year. The scenes are real historical moments — the Magna Carta at Runnymede in 1215, D-Day on Omaha Beach in 1944, the Parthenon under construction around 447 BCE, Hammurabi's Babylon. You stand inside the panorama as if you were there.
A daily session takes about 3-7 minutes.
As of 2026-05-13 the library has 374 scenes, bucketed into four non-overlapping era pools:
| Pool | Year range | Scenes |
|---|---|---|
| Ancient | ≤ 500 CE | 89 |
| Medieval | 501–1500 | 89 |
| Renaissance | 1501–1900 | 98 |
| Modern | 1901+ | 98 |
| Total | 374 |
Each panorama is an AI-generated cinematic stitched into a 360° viewable sphere, then ranked for historical difficulty by a second AI pass. Every scene must occur on Earth (no moon, no Mars, no orbit) and must render in full color, even when the source reference photo is famously monochrome. More on the pipeline →
Five scenes a day, the same five for every player worldwide, like Wordle. Deterministic seed by date. Fully anonymous — no signup required. Sign-in is optional and unlocks leaderboard tracking + streaks + seasons.
Pick an era (Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, or Modern). Play unlimited 5-round sessions. Sharpen your scores on whichever era you most want to master. Paid tier; the free Daily Challenge is not going away.
Each round scores distance (kilometers off) and year (years off) on a curve. The year score is scaled per era — a 50-year miss in 2000 BCE shouldn't score the same as a 50-year miss in 1980, and it doesn't. The Modern pool uses a tight sigma (~25 years); the Ancient pool uses a loose one (~500 years). Worked Hammurabi example + the full math →
Where in Time was built solo by @handleofiron, a digital collage artist who was profiled by Myartisreal Magazine in 2020. The collage practice is on Instagram; Where in Time is the first solo software project.
"Make sure that you create art that you really enjoy making — don't go out of your way to make something that you know other people are going to enjoy because then it becomes a job." — @handleofiron, Myartisreal interview, July 2020
The same philosophy carried into Where in Time. Built in roughly two weeks from "I want to make a Wordle for history" to live launch. Vanilla JavaScript frontend, Express backend, no framework, no build step. The dev journal at /journal/building-where-in-time/ covers the technical build, the panorama pipeline, the scoring-math derivation, and the three things I'd do differently.
For bugs: bugs@whereintime.ai. For press, interviews, or scene suggestions: contact@whereintime.ai. The press kit has logos, screenshots, and a contact mailto.