Before / After

A hidden target event is waiting to be dated. You're shown an anchor event and decide whether the target came before or after it. Each correct call narrows the visible window of possible years; you have six guesses to close the window and pin the date.

• Every call shrinks the range of possible years
• You get a limited number of guesses, so each one counts
• Faster, more accurate runs score higher

• Desktop: click Before or After for each anchor
• Phone & tablet: tap Before or After, no keyboard needed

• Difficulty: Easy, Medium or Hard
• Daily shared round or endless Practice

• Treat each anchor like a binary search, aim to halve the window
• Pin down a couple of well-known reference dates to reason from
• Watch the window edges; the target sits somewhere inside them

Before / After turns dating events into a guided narrowing puzzle, building a sense of when things happened relative to each other.

• Skills: chronology, dating historical events, deductive reasoning
• Best for: roughly grades 5–10 (ages 10–16)
• For parents & teachers: turns dating events into satisfying deduction.

Dating a hidden event by comparing it to anchors, each answer narrowing the window, is binary search over chronology.

Showing the window shrink is the original device.

Anchoring is how historical dating actually works for non-specialists. Nobody holds a calendar of centuries; they hold a few fixed points and place everything else relative to them, so the method the game enforces is the one people already use badly.

Before / After is an original history deduction game that turns dating events into a guided narrowing puzzle. It's free to play in your browser, no install required.

A free, original browser game on PlayPendium. No download, no install.