Can You Date the Map? - Daily Challenge

Randall Munroe's famous xkcd comic Map Age Guide distilled two centuries of global geopolitics into a wonderfully simple flowchart for dating maps. Does the map show Germany divided into East and West? Is there a Yugoslavia? Does South Sudan exist? By answering a handful of such questions about borders and country names, the comic demonstrates how you can usually work out when almost any modern map was made.

Date the Globe turns this idea into a really fun daily map game.

Each day Date the Globe presents you with a new historical map. Your challenge is to identify the exact year the map was published using nothing more than the geopolitical clues it contains. Every border, country and place-name offers a clue. Some countries appear only briefly in history, borders shift over time, and official place-names change with political regimes. Reading the map becomes an exercise in historical detective work.

You have six attempts to guess a year between 1900 and 2025. After each incorrect guess the game tells you whether the correct answer is earlier or later and how close you are: hot if you're within two years, warm within nine, cool within twenty-four and cold if you're further away. A timeline also marks off years that have been ruled out.

The game's most original feature is its evidence system. Every incorrect guess prompts the game's fictional archivist to remove one place-name from the map and file it away as evidence. Open the evidence file and you'll discover why that name conflicts with your chosen year. Perhaps you've guessed a date before a country came into existence, or after a city had adopted a new official name. When every remaining name fits your guess, the archivist instead highlights a place-name whose period of use helps narrow the date even further.

If you've ever looked at an old atlas and instinctively dated it by spotting Czechoslovakia, Rhodesia or the Soviet Union, then Date the Globe is a game made for you. It transforms the changing political geography of the last 125 years into an entertaining daily puzzle - and proves that every map is also a snapshot of history.