Ten history packs.
Each pack is a thematic set of questions, written for the reader who is curious but rusty. Five questions per round; wrong answers explain themselves. Pick a pack and play. Your progress is saved on this device — no login.
Suggested first pack: History, Can You Eat That? — the gentlest entry point. Or pick any pack that catches your eye; they are independent.
History, Can You Eat That?
The starter pack.
Twenty-five quick questions that ease you in. No knowledge assumed. Wrong answers explain themselves. Start here if you came for the stories, not the test.
Getting Up to Speed
The bits everyone forgot.
Charlemagne, Hastings, Magna Carta, Waterloo, the Bastille. The dates and names that schools used to drill, lightly framed for the rest of us.
The Old World
Antiquity to early medieval.
Athens, Alexander, Caesar, Cleopatra, the Library, the Fall. The Mediterranean and its neighbours before the year 1000.
Empires and Cathedrals
High medieval to early modern.
Crusaders and conquistadors, kings and popes, Luther and Henry VIII, Joan of Arc and Saladin. The world from 1000 to 1700.
Engines and Revolutions
1800 to today.
Industrial steam, American independence, Napoleon, Victoria, two world wars, the Cold War, the Berlin Wall. The world we still live in.
Death and Disaster
The coroner column.
Eruptions, explosions, plagues, fires, shipwrecks. The events whose body counts make them historically loud — and the small specific deaths that made them human.
Conquest and Empire
Armies, sieges, and the maps that change.
Hannibal in the Alps, Cortés at Tenochtitlán, the Mongol invasions, the Spanish Armada, the Crusader states. How territory changes hands.
Discovery and Invention
The moments the world worked differently.
Eratosthenes with two shadows. Hipparchus with the precessing sky. Koch and the cholera bacillus. The Antikythera bronze. Maimonides at the Cairo court.
Power and Politics
Courts, coups, and dynasties.
The Ides of March, the She-Wolf of France, Mortimer at Tyburn, the death of King Sebastian, the night Napoleon crowned himself.
Faith and Madness
Religion, witch trials, dancing plagues.
Strasbourg dancing itself to death in 1518. Kepler defending his mother from the stake. The flagellants of 1349. The Tanganyika laughter epidemic.
Pack progress is stored in this browser only. Clearing your browser data will reset it. The questions you answer correctly retire from rotation until you've cleared the whole pack.