Which came first — the fax machine or the moon landing? Not close.
▶ Play TimelineThe hook
Everyone thinks they have decent chronological instincts until five household objects prove them wrong. Timeline hands you five things — inventions, events, prices, sizes — already shuffled, and asks you to drag them into order along an axis that changes daily: sometimes "oldest first," sometimes "cheapest first," sometimes "smallest first." The fun isn't really the puzzle; it's the two minutes of family argument that happen before anyone touches the phone. Someone is always, gloriously, sure of something completely wrong.
A sample round
1 · Today's axis: invented first to last
2 · Dad insists fax is 90s tech
3 · Full marks — and bragging rights
How a round plays
- Five surprising things appear in random order; the axis changes daily (date, size, price, speed…).
- Drag them into what you believe is the correct order for that axis.
- Lock in your order — the reveal shows the true order and how many you placed correctly.
- Partial credit for near-misses; a perfect order is a rare full-marks day.
- Share your grid of checks and swaps, never the actual order, so friends still get to argue.
Why it's sticky
Trivia games live and die on whether the losers feel bad. Timeline sidesteps that: the axis rotates daily so nobody's domain knowledge dominates for long (today's music-fan flexes on release dates, tomorrow's geography kid flexes on river lengths), and partial credit means even a wrong order usually lands two or three placements right. The real hook is social — every session produces at least one "wait, THAT was before THAT?" moment that gets repeated at dinner for a week.
Modes
- Daily — one shared set of five and one shared axis, streaks and share grid in localStorage.
- Practice — unlimited random sets, pick your own axis (date, size, price, speed).
- Family debate — pass the phone, argue out loud, only one shared order gets locked in per household.
Build notes
Size: S. The shared shell provides the daily-seed picker, streak/stats store, share-grid generator, and how-to-play screen. Game-specific work is a dataset of "surprising fact" items pre-tagged along multiple orderable axes (so the same five items can be re-shuffled by date one day, by size another), a drag-and-drop reordering interaction, and a near-miss scorer that compares guessed order to true order for partial credit rather than strict pass/fail. Core ordering and scoring logic is a plain JS module, decoupled from the drag UI, so a future link-shared "beat my order" async mode drops in cleanly.