Show HN: Built a daily game where you sort historical events chronologically

63 points by damiannn 2 days ago|59 comments

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.

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matt_daemon 2 days ago

NYT has a weekly version of this for those interested

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/04/17/upshot/flashb...

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damiannn 2 days ago

imagine waiting a week lol

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Jordan-117 2 days ago

The 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.

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damiannn 2 days ago

fair 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? :)

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wwalker2112 2 days ago

Very 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!

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InitialLastName 2 days ago

If 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.

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damiannn 2 days ago

That's actually not a bad idea, will definitely consider that.

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SkepticalWhale 2 days ago

Very cool! Consider adding a wikipedia link to each card after the game is over.

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damiannn 2 days ago

thanks for suggestion, definitely gonna implement something like that soon

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defrost 2 days ago

Noodling 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

( 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?

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jtokoph 2 days ago

Most 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.

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damiannn 2 days ago

very 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

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natloz 18 hours ago

Wow, 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.

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damiannn 17 hours ago

glad to hear you find UI easy to use -> that is my main goal. btw, were the images working? cause i just found out they were not working for a couple of hours, already fixed it :D

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natloz 4 hours ago

I saw images (I think?), nothing looked off!

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sco1 2 days ago

Very fun! My family is a big fan of the Chronology card game (https://buffalogames.com/chronology/), hopefully this helps me win next next time :)

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damiannn 2 days ago

glad you like it!

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FailMore 2 days ago

Nice, 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) page.

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damiannn 2 days ago

Thankss! Yeah, good tip.

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delichon 2 days ago

A 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.

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damiannn 2 days ago

not a bad idea at all, would be fun :D

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J0rdanius 2 days ago

Neat! 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.

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damiannn 2 days ago

yeah, 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

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steinvakt2 2 days ago

This, as well as the NYT game, is heavily inspired by https://www.timdle.com ?

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damiannn 2 days ago

i 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.

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vunderba 2 days ago

Timdle'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.

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damiannn 2 days ago

yeah, 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

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irq-1 2 days ago

Should 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.)

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coder97 2 days ago

Nice game. I can see myself playing this daily.

How do you plan to feed the questions? Is it with AI or manual work?

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damiannn 2 days ago

AI - 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.

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Jordan-117 2 days ago

I 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?

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damiannn 2 days ago

tbh 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

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snarf21 2 days ago

Maybe I missed it but if I don't solve in time, it didn't show me the correct answers.

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damiannn 2 days ago

There is no timer implemented as far as i know :D , it shouldn't be the case :D

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emberfiend 2 days ago

cool game, maybe consider removing the eternally looping animation in the header, it's pretty visually distracting

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MrDunham 2 days ago

Or loop once/twice... it's a fun effect, but when endless I agree that it's distracting

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damiannn 2 days ago

yeah, 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

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pixel_popping 2 days ago

Excellent name!

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damiannn 2 days ago

thankss!

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jordanscales 2 days ago

Nice work! I'd consider ditching the AI art though, it was distracting.

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damiannn 2 days ago

I 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

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Jordan-117 2 days ago

You 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.

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damiannn 2 days ago

yeah, 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

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elpocko 2 days ago

Not everyone likes daily games. I hate them. That shouldn't stop you from making a daily game. Ignore the haters.

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damiannn 2 days ago

well said

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lgcmo 2 days ago

I believe pulling art/media from Wikipedia would be cooler and less controversial. I also believe the licensing allows it.

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damiannn 2 days ago

yeah, got your point. i still find the style of my generated images pretty nice and consistent.

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sputknick 2 days ago

I'll take the other side of this argument: I like the AI art. Easy way to make it more visually engaging

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tdb7893 2 days ago

How 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

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krapp 2 days ago

They'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.

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damiannn 2 days ago

Agree. 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.

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Error403agent 2 days ago

Fun

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damiannn 2 days ago

thanks

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AndrewKemendo 2 days ago

I 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?

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damiannn 2 days ago

Yeah 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.

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everyone 2 days ago

awesome! 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.

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damiannn 2 days ago

got 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

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techsystems 2 days ago

Cool, I would play this

Hopefully EMEA isn't all of history /s

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damiannn 2 days ago

no, just a coincidence today, haha