How to Play Meanwhile

1. Objective

Meanwhile is a daily history game built on one question: were these two things around at the same time? Could Mozart have seen a hot air balloon? Could he have met Napoleon? Is Cleopatra nearer in time to the Great Pyramid, or to us? You answer each card on instinct, against a clock, and then the real dates are drawn on a timeline to scale, so you see exactly why you were right or wrong.

No dates are shown while a question is up, because the dates are the answer. You answer from what you already believe about the past, and the timeline corrects it.

2. The Daily Round

One round publishes every day, twelve cards long, and everyone gets the same twelve.

• Free, with no account. Anyone can play today's round. Sign in to keep your record and be rated.
• One attempt a day. Once the twelve are answered, the board counts down to tomorrow's round.
• A gentle start. The first three cards are the easier ones. After that, easy and hard cards are mixed through the round.
• Every card is settled by its dates. Where a date is uncertain enough to flip the answer, that card is never asked.

The cards are drawn from curated lists of people, buildings, inventions, empires, battles, paintings, books, foods, sports and extinct animals, so one round can put a composer beside an empire, or a painting beside a dish.

3. Three Kinds of Card

Every round holds five overlap cards, four distance cards and three compound cards. Each kind has its own clock, and the two answers sit at the foot of the board as two big buttons.

Overlap 12 seconds

Did the two exist at the same time? Answer YES or NO. One shared year is enough. The verb says what is being claimed: met for two people, seen for anything a person could look at, read for a book, heard for a recording, and known of for an empire, a faith or a theory. A painting, a book or an invention stays in the world once it appears, so anyone alive after that could have seen it; an event such as a battle counts only in its own year.

Distance 14 seconds

Is the first thing nearer in time to the second, or to us? Pick one side. A person is measured from their birth and a building from its completion, and us means this year.

Compound 20 seconds

Two claims about one person in a single sentence. Answer TRUE only when both halves hold. One failing half makes the whole sentence false.

The clock runs only while a question is up. When it runs out, the card scores nothing and the board shows the answer anyway: you lose the question, never the round. Reading the answer is never timed.

4. Reading the Timeline

After every card the answer opens on a timeline, and the timeline is the explanation. It is drawn to scale over that card's own dates, so a gap of 2,500 years looks like one.

• A bar is something that lasted: a life, an empire, a building still standing.
• A mark is the year something appeared or happened: an invention, a book, a battle.
• The gold pole is today. It appears on distance cards, where us is one of the two answers.
• A pale band round a date shows how far it could be off, and that date carries a ~, as in ~2560 BCE.
• A faint lead-in shows where something existed before the wider world could have met it: the potato runs from the Andes, around 8000 BCE, into a solid mark around 1570.
• The bracket is what settles the card, labelled in years: the gap between two things, the stretch they share, or the two distances on a distance card.

Above the timeline, one line gives the deciding number, such as With 8 years to spare or Sergei Rachmaninoff misses by 82 years. Below it, every name gets a card with its dates, what it is, and one fact worth knowing, so a round leaves you with twenty-four of them. On a compound card each half is marked on its own, so you can see which half let you down.

Years before the common era read BCE, and anything a million years back or more reads Mya, millions of years ago.

5. Points, Streaks and Rating

• 10 points for every right call.
• A streak bonus on top: each right call in a row adds 2 more, up to 10 extra, so a long run is worth 20 a card. A perfect round is worth 210.
• A wrong call or a timeout scores nothing and resets the streak.

Signed-in players are rated. Every player starts at 1500, and what moves your rating is how many of the twelve you got right. Speed adds to it, but only on the calls you got right, so answering fast and wrong is worth nothing.

A day counts towards your day streak as soon as you get one card right. Your rating ranks you on the Meanwhile leaderboard, and feeds the one Overall rating BattleGuess keeps for you across every game you play.

6. Why It Fools Everyone

Cleopatra was born nearly 2,500 years after the Great Pyramid of Giza was finished, and just over 2,000 years before Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. She lived nearer in time to the Moon landing than to the building of the pyramid.

It sounds wrong because of how the past is stored. Everything ancient sits on one shelf in memory, so Cleopatra and the pyramids feel like neighbours: both Egypt, both long ago. The further back two things are, the closer together they feel, and the more a timeline drawn to scale surprises you.

That gap between how far apart things feel and how far apart they were is what the game is built on. The cards you remember are the ones where your instinct and the dates disagree most, and it is also how the card of the day is chosen.

7. Tips

• Anchor on a date you know. One birth year you are sure of turns a guess into a sum, and the clock leaves time for one.
• Read the verb. Met needs two lifetimes to overlap. Seen needs the thing to exist while the person was alive. One shared year settles either.
• Measure a distance card from the start. A person counts from their birth and a building from its completion, not from when they were famous.
• Settle the doubtful half of a compound first. One failing half is enough to make it false.
• Distrust the distant past. When two ancient things feel like neighbours, that is exactly where the timeline most often proves otherwise.