About Frontline, the daily history game

Frontline is a free daily history and geography game. Each day you get five famous battles, from the chariots at Megiddo in ancient Egypt to the 20th century. For each one, drop a pin on a blank world map where you think it was fought, then guess the year. There are no country names, cities or labels on the map: just coastlines, borders, rivers and lakes.

How to play

• Pin it. Tap the map where the battle was fought. Spin the globe and zoom in to fine-tune, or switch to a flat map.
• Date it. Set the year: slide to the right century, then adjust by single years or type it in. BC dates work too.
• See how you did. The real site appears with a short note on what happened, how far off you were in kilometres and years, and everyone else's guesses.

Scoring

Place counts for about two thirds of each round and the year for the rest. You get full marks for place within 50 km, and being a few years off barely costs anything. Older battles give you more slack on the year, since few people know the exact date of a battle from 400 BC. The day goes two easy battles, two medium and one hard, worth 150, 150, 200, 200 and 300 points, so a perfect day is 1000. Stuck? Every round names the war it was part of, and a clue tells you more about where and when for 30% of that round's points.

Which battles are in it?

Close to 300 battles from every continent and over three thousand years of history: Marathon, Thermopylae and Cannae; Hastings, Agincourt and the fall of Constantinople; Waterloo, Gettysburg and Balaclava; Adwa, Isandlwana and Tsushima; the Somme, Stalingrad and Midway. Easy rounds are the battles most people have heard of, and hard rounds reach further, like Ain Jalut, Panipat or Talas.

Questions

Is it free? Yes, and there's nothing to install. It works in any browser on phones, tablets and computers.

When are there new battles? Every day at midnight US Eastern time (9pm Pacific), the same moment for everyone, so the whole world plays the same five battles on one leaderboard.

Is there more? Try Contrail, where you draw the shortest flight path between airports on a world map, and Interstate, where you trace a US highway on a blank map of the states.

Ideas, bugs or a question? Email contrailgg@proton.me.