Contemporaries

You are dealt a hand of historical figures with their birth and death years. A group counts only if a single year exists where every member was alive, that is, the latest birth is no later than the earliest death. Build the largest such overlapping group, faster for more points.

• Tap figures to add them to your set
• The overlap readout tells you whether everyone currently selected shares a year
• Use a hint to reveal a member of a largest possible group
• Submit your biggest valid group before the clock adds up

• Desktop: click figures to select them, click Submit, Clear or Hint
• Phone & tablet: tap figures and the action buttons

• Sort the overlap in your head by the latest birth and earliest death, those two dates set the window
• One long-lived figure can bridge two generations that otherwise never overlap
• Easy, Medium and Hard change the hand size and how tightly the lifespans cluster

Contemporaries is an interval-overlap logic puzzle in history, testing how well you reason about who lived at the same time.

• Skills: chronology, historical figures, interval reasoning, logic
• Best for: roughly grades 6–11 (ages 11–16)
• For parents & teachers: reason about who could have met whom.

Finding a year in which every figure in a hand was alive — the latest birth no later than the earliest death — is an interval overlap problem wearing a history costume.

Stating the rule in exactly those terms is the original precision.

The overlaps are reliably surprising. Lifespans that feel like different eras frequently intersect, and the arithmetic is unforgiving where intuition is not, which is why "who could have met whom" is a better test of chronological sense than any date question.

Further reading: Could They Have Met?

Contemporaries is an original interval-overlap logic puzzle dressed in history, testing how well you reason about who lived at the same time. Play free in your browser with daily and practice hands.

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

1. Could They Have Met?

   Every round poses one deceptively simple question. Its whole answer is stored in just two integers per person, and in one quiet leap from a handshake to a crowd.