Identify the historical figure from clues that get clearer with every guess, guess early to score big.
You are shown the opening clue or clues about a historical figure, plus their field and era. Type a name and guess. A wrong guess reveals another, sharper clue. The fewer clues you need, the higher your score, so it pays to commit early when you have a hunch. There are 100 figures across ten fields, from science and politics to music and exploration, ranging from the ancient world to the 20th century.
On Medium you start with two clues. The pills say Science and 20th century. Clue one: born in the 19th century, this person reshaped how we understand the universe. Clue two: they worked for a time as a patent clerk before becoming famous.
The era pill rules out Isaac Newton, and the patent office is the giveaway: Albert Einstein was an examiner at the Patent Office in Bern when he wrote his 1905 papers, relativity among them. Guess him now and you score 950: 1,000, minus 150 for the second clue, plus the Medium bonus of 100.
Hold back and the clues do the work for you instead. The third calls them a byword for genius, the fourth names the theory of relativity and E = mc², and by then the answer is worth 800 and then 650. Waiting for the fifth clue drops it to 500.
Portrait is a progressive-clue deduction game about famous people from history, building knowledge of who shaped the past.
Naming a historical figure from clues that sharpen with each wrong guess is progressive disclosure applied to biography.
Guessing a hidden person from accumulating hints is an old parlor game. Twenty questions dates to at least the eighteenth century, appears as "yes and no" in Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol, and became an American radio panel show in 1946; famous people have always been one of its favourite categories.
Portrait's scoring borrows from competitive quiz. In quiz bowl, the standard question is a pyramidal tossup: several clues read in order from hardest to easiest, so the player who knows the subject best can buzz first. Portrait turns the buzz into a guess and rewards the same thing, answering while the clues are still hard.
The clue order does real work. Field and era narrow the field to a population rather than a person, so the early guesses are necessarily about who is famous enough to be asked about — which is a question about historical memory as much as about history.
Portrait is an original, free browser game made for PlayPendium: 100 figures, from Tutankhamun and Cleopatra to Alan Turing and Maya Angelou, a shared daily figure, an endless practice mode and three difficulties.