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Show HN: Built a daily game where you sort historical events chronologically
Hey folks,
I built Hisorty, a small daily game where you sort historical events in chronological order (strongly inspired by Wordle mechanics).
Each day you get 6 events and 3 attempts to place them correctly.
I found it surprisingly tricky to design those puzzles so the difficulty is just about right.
Would love feedback on:
- difficulty balance
- UI/UX
- whether the concept feels engaging long-term
Happy to answer any questions about how I built it.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- FailMore 6mo agoNice, I enjoyed it. Fyi I think you should edit the title to be "Show HN: <title>". This will mean it will be on the /show (https://news.ycombinator.com/show https://news.ycombinator.com/show) page.
- damiannn 6mo agoThankss! Yeah, good tip.
- jordanscales 6mo agoNice work! I'd consider ditching the AI art though, it was distracting.
- damiannn 6mo agoI love those :D took me some time to come up with the custom prompt to make those images have that specific art style, but yeah, I understand that not everyone like s AI art
- elpocko 6mo agoNot everyone likes daily games. I hate them. That shouldn't stop you from making a daily game. Ignore the haters.
- damiannn 6mo agowell said
- Jordan-117 6mo agoYou might want to tinker with the prompt a bit to get a different style; the AI vibe is very noticeable as-is, especially at a smaller scale.
- damiannn 6mo agoyeah, i'll probably adjust the prompt for image generation to make them look more hand-drawn, visible brush strokes. i tried to express this in my current prompt, but gemini kinda slipped into this AI style too much xd
- sputknick 6mo agoI'll take the other side of this argument: I like the AI art. Easy way to make it more visually engaging
- lgcmo 6mo agoI believe pulling art/media from Wikipedia would be cooler and less controversial. I also believe the licensing allows it.
- damiannn 6mo agoyeah, got your point. i still find the style of my generated images pretty nice and consistent.
- AndrewKemendo 6mo agoI like it! A quality old school learning game, like we had in the 90s I’m also a huge history guy so anything that helps people understand history better is great Was the goal just to make this for yourself and see how it goes?
- damiannn 6mo agoYeah basically, I'm very curious to see if people will actually find this wordle-like history game interesting and if they'll stick to it. But i also often find myself just staring at some of those images and eventually finding more about some of those on the internet.
- tdb7893 6mo agoHow accurate are these pictures? I feel like I see ideas like this on HN pretty often and the art always gets things wrong. Like all the same clean armor during the first crusade seems doubtful and two swords on horseback just seems wacky. Two swords like that is dumb normally but also how do you control the horse lmao
- krapp 6mo agoThey're AI generated, so obviously not accurate. Although we live in a post-truth age and AI generated photos are used in historical and academic contexts now so it doesn't really matter much anymore. The past is just a vibe.
- damiannn 6mo agoAgree. My goal wasn’t 100% accuracy so much as capturing the overall feel of the event, more like a collage that includes key people, features and atmosphere of that period.
- wwalker2112 6mo agoVery fun. Would you consider putting years on the timeline to match the events up to? I think from an education perspective it would be a great feature! Nice Work!
- damiannn 6mo agoThat's actually not a bad idea, will definitely consider that.
- InitialLastName 6mo agoIf you mean adding the years of the events to a timeline to match to, I think that's too much information. In this case, I knew the rough dates of all but one of the events in the list; adding years in a timeline would have given the last away.
- J0rdanius 6mo agoNeat! I think with more events (~9) and obscure ones it would be more fun. I also think it would be fun to make it possible to play previous days. Bookmarked.
- damiannn 6mo agoyeah, i was considering it, but to be honest the only reason i decided to go with 6 event is to make it playable on mobile device with images big enough to see soemthing :D
- matt_daemon 6mo agoNYT has a weekly version of this for those interested https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/04/17/upshot/flashback.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/04/17/upshot/flashb...
- damiannn 6mo agoimagine waiting a week lol
- Jordan-117 6mo agoThe benefit there is that the events are hand-curated with interesting historical facts and link to articles on the topic if you want to read more. Also real photographs, not extremely obvious AI imagery. The mechanics are also nicer -- placing events one by one ramps the difficulty up rather than trying to one-shot it and correcting mistakes.
- damiannn 6mo agofair point, my images are not meant to be realistic anyway, I actually prefer this semi-realistic, high-contrast, rich in color style - that's why I generate them having that specific style. anyways, isn't it great that there are different takes on the concept so everyone can pick what fits them best? :)
- steinvakt2 6mo agoThis, as well as the NYT game, is heavily inspired by https://www.timdle.com https://www.timdle.com ?
- damiannn 6mo agoi was HEAVILY inspired by wordle, wanted to create a daily game with similar mechanics. This concept came to my mind, but yeah, after it came to my mind i checked if something like that already exists and bumped into thing you just posted. UX seemed kinda complicated to my, my idea was to make it as simple as possible, drag & drop, so people can play it while commuting daily (tram, metro, bus), and will take like 2 minutes of their time.
- irq-1 6mo agoShould have 5+ puzzles to do on the first day, so people can play enough to remember it. (They can be the same 5 static puzzles.)
- vunderba 6mo agoTimdle's UI is a bit wonky but the NYT puzzle is very straightforward - you just drag and drop each event into the timeline. The reason it's weekly is because they likely are curating them by hand.
- damiannn 6mo agoyeah, that drag & dropping event into timeline one by one definitely has something to it, I was also considering this concept it’t just about which style and mechanics people wanna do more
- defrost 6mo agoNoodling kind of question, Share results / copy to Clipboard both seem to put the same string in the local clipboard: Hisorty #9 1/3 https://hisorty.app https://hisorty.app ( the six green squares don't render on HN ) ... which is still a string that can be readily edited. It's more resources your end to save game results for a specific play and generate a unique checksummed hash key for a third party URL lookup, sure, so I guess the question is how important is it for players to reliably share their results in a manner that is hard than a simple edit to 'cheat' on?
- damiannn 6mo agovery good question. My take is that once the result becomes this easy to manipulate, like simply editing the result string, it kinda defeats the purpose of doing so :D . If anyone can do it then it kinda loses meaning and there’s not much point to doing so in the first place
- jtokoph 6mo agoMost people share their result with friends and family in text threads. It’s for fun and starts discussions, many times out of a solution being surprising or tough. The best times are when one of us can’t figure out a solution and we give each other hints.
- snarf21 6mo agoMaybe I missed it but if I don't solve in time, it didn't show me the correct answers.
- damiannn 6mo agoThere is no timer implemented as far as i know :D , it shouldn't be the case :D
- pixel_popping 6mo agoExcellent name!
- damiannn 6mo agothankss!
- delichon 6mo agoA fun variation would be to create the cards from social media posts or articles, stripped of dates. It's astonishing how little context the geoguessers need, I expect the same for chronoguessers.
- damiannn 6mo agonot a bad idea at all, would be fun :D
- Error403agent 6mo agoFun
- damiannn 6mo agothanks
- 0x1da49 6mo ago[flagged]
- coder97 6mo agoNice game. I can see myself playing this daily. How do you plan to feed the questions? Is it with AI or manual work?
- damiannn 6mo agoAI - I created a custom prompt to generate those event, so that the difficulty is just right, not that easy, but not that hard also. Took some iterations to polish it, now it kinda feels just right. Same with the image generation - custom prompt so they have this specific style.
- Jordan-117 6mo agoI noticed the images are from Gemini, but what's with the rectangular blurring in the bottom-right corner? It only covers part of the logo, so I assume you weren't trying to hide it. Is there some kind of embedded identifier? I remember DALL-E images having something similar, but does Gemini actually link it to your account or something?
- damiannn 6mo agotbh I didn’t want to hide the gemini watermark at all, i’m just processing images (size, optimization) using CC, and for some reason it decided to blur them - and did a pretty shitty job at it, haha
- emberfiend 6mo agocool game, maybe consider removing the eternally looping animation in the header, it's pretty visually distracting
- MrDunham 6mo agoOr loop once/twice... it's a fun effect, but when endless I agree that it's distracting
- damiannn 6mo agoyeah, you're not the first mentioning this. I was just so proud of that name + animation combo I had to make sure it's visible all the time xdd but yeah, will consider dropping it / adjusting intensity
- everyone 6mo agoawesome! but the one per day thing kills it for me.. I want to play like 10 in a row and then forget about it for a few months.
- damiannn 6mo agogot you man, had this problem with wordle too, but there's something nice about being only able to play it once a day. daily ritual while drinking your morning coffee and then sharing it with ur family/friend of course :D :D
- SkepticalWhale 6mo agoVery cool! Consider adding a wikipedia link to each card after the game is over.
- damiannn 6mo agothanks for suggestion, definitely gonna implement something like that soon
- techsystems 6mo agoCool, I would play this Hopefully EMEA isn't all of history /s
- damiannn 6mo agono, just a coincidence today, haha
- scorpion888 6mo ago[dead]
- maryjeiel 6mo ago[dead]
- sco1 6mo agoVery fun! My family is a big fan of the Chronology card game (https://buffalogames.com/chronology/ https://buffalogames.com/chronology/), hopefully this helps me win next next time :)
- damiannn 6mo agoglad you like it!
- natloz 6mo agoWow, just played my first game and I wild-guessed it and got it right in 1 attempt. Maybe time to go buy a lotto ticket...I honestly had no clue! Good job on the easy-to-use interface.
- freema77 6mo agoFun game. I like the name! Consider making the card description two rows on mobile. All of them got truncated, so I had to click on them to be able to read the last word. I think you have space for the full text.
- damiannn 6mo agoguys, I added OPTIONAL google login, so you can play on many devices without losing streak & stats. Wanna migrate current streak & stats to you google account? -> just go to the desired device and sign-in there. -> local progress will be migrated to your new account. This only happens on first login.
- royal__ 6mo agoThe "earlier" and "later" labels really confused me because I think they could be interpreted either way. Also the AI art is corny. But I'm guessing this is all just AI generated
- damiannn 6mo agoWhat other labels would you suggest?
- fermatf 6mo agoCool! Fun to play, nice name. I like such playful ways to learn something. Gonna suggest to play it with my family.
- damiannn 6mo agoThanks man! Yeah, share it with the world! haha
- steinvakt2 6mo agoMaybe https://kviss.eu/ https://kviss.eu/ is enjoyable for the people in this thread.
- Skinless1501 5mo agoI been playing this daily for a week also shared it with friends. If you see 3 users from Dubai everyday that’s us. One thing annoys me about the streak is that I must it get on first attempt to count. Consider making the streak by winning within the allowed attempts.
- damiannn 5mo agoHey man, glad you're enjoying the game! Actually, that's how it works now. Are you sure you haven't skipped a day? That would indeed break the streak. Cheers.