Everything a journalist or newsletter editor needs to write about guessNow: descriptions, facts, screenshots, an embed and story angles. Free browser game, real archive photographs, guess the year.
guessNow is a free daily browser game that reveals a real archival photograph piece by piece and asks you to guess the year it was taken, before your 300 HP runs out.
guessNow shows you a genuine historical photograph, revealed progressively and then dated. You slide to the year and see how long you last across five rounds a day (all players get the same five). Every photograph is a real image from the Library of Congress and other public archives — no stock, no AI-generated imagery — and each reveal shows the photographer, licence and source, so a guess doubles as a lesson in dating evidence and source criticism.
Free, no account, no ads, no student data, works in any browser on any device (phone, tablet or projector) — a single domain, easy to whitelist. Over 200 archival photographs from 1855 to the present. Five-round Daily Challenge (shared by every player, resets at midnight UTC) plus unlimited practice mode. The answer screen shows the photographer, the date, the licence and the source archive. Made by independent developer Antoni Kowalski. Contact antoni.kowalski@guessnow.fun.
Most history guessing games use stock photos or AI-generated imagery, which cannot be dated or sourced. guessNow is built entirely on real archive photographs with their provenance kept on every reveal, which makes it a working source-criticism exercise — a whole lesson is the act of dating an image and then checking the record. For a class it is a source-critical activity that runs in twenty seconds a round, with no signup and no student data collected.
Wordle for history buffs, but the photographs are real. The provenance game: why real, attributed archive photographs matter when AI-generated history is everywhere. A daily habit that teaches dating evidence in twenty seconds. How a solo developer built a classroom game from Library of Congress records. The daily shared puzzle and what it feels like to have every player dating the same five photographs.
The game and an intro guide are live. Screenshots of the reveal and a 1200x630 social card are available on request, as is a walkthrough — write to antoni.kowalski@guessnow.fun. Every photograph in the archive carries its photographer, licence and source, ready to link from any article.
The Daily Challenge is one round deep in about twenty seconds: date today's five photographs before they reset at midnight UTC. The full archive is free to browse, and the primary-source guide explains why a real photograph with a real record is worth teaching.