How to play Chrono
A timeline that starts with one event and its year. Six more events are dealt one at a time, with no year, and you drag each to where it belongs. Every card you place makes the gaps tighter. One puzzle a day, on the second shelf, outside the daily line-up.
Play today's Chrono · Watch the gameplay demo
The rules
- The line runs earliest at the top, latest at the bottom, and it starts with one event whose year is showing.
- The card in hand is an event with no year, sitting under the line. Drag it into the gap it belongs in — the gap lights as the card comes over it — and let go. Changed your mind on the way? Bring the card back down to where it was and nothing is spent.
- Or tap. Tap the gap — a tap on the nearer half of a card beside it counts too — and the gap opens into Place here. Tap that to commit. Two taps, so a stray thumb is never a mistake; tap a different gap to change your mind first.
- Right, and the card slots in green with its year. Wrong, and it slides to its true place, red. Either way the line is correct afterward, so the next card is judged against the truth, not against your mistake.
- Six cards, and each has one more gap to choose from than the last: the first has two, the sixth has seven.
- No two events in a day share a year. The dock says how far apart the day’s closest pair is, and the day’s band: Gentle days keep every pair at least 20 years apart, Fair days 8, Mean days 3.
- One puzzle a day. Your progress is saved card by card, so a refresh is not a second attempt; the archive holds every past day.
Strategy
- You never need the year, only the order. “Before or after the Moon landing?” is an easier question than “when?” — ask it of each neighbor in turn.
- Hang events on things you do know. A president, a war, a decade’s music, what your grandparents would have been doing. A film came out after the technology in it; a book after the events it describes.
- The early cards are footholds. They are dealt with the most room around them, and they come with a year once placed. Read those years: they are what the tight cards at the end are measured against.
- Use the closest pair. If the dock says the closest pair is nine years, a card cannot belong in a gap that is too narrow to hold it nine years from both sides.
- A miss is not wasted. The card lands where it belongs with its year showing, and the next card may hinge on exactly that year.
Scoring
Your score is the share of the six cards you placed in the right gap first time, out of 100 — about 17 points a card, and every card is worth the same. Six of six is 100; four of six is 67. Chrono sits outside the daily line-up, so its score never moves your day’s total.
Full details on how scoring works.