Games
Yearbook: four clues, one year.
Yearbook is a daily year-guessing game. Start with one clue and get more context after each wrong guess.
How to play
- Read the first clue and enter the year you think it describes.
- A wrong guess reveals the next clue, up to four clues.
- Use the feedback to judge how close your best guess was. Exact answers receive a grade based on the guess number; near misses can still earn a lower passing grade.
What makes a good guess
Yearbook is not meant to be a race to recognize one headline. The clues come from different categories and become more helpful as you go, so the answer should emerge from the combination. Everyone playing that day gets the same target.
The story behind Yearbook
I talked with Playlin about why I built Yearbook, how I think about difficulty and nostalgia, and what I hope players get out of it.
Clues, sources, and corrections
Clues are researched from Wikimedia’s On This Day material and event-specific articles, then checked before a puzzle is shared. A source link gives you a place to look more closely; it does not mean every source settles every historical question. If a clue seems misleading or inaccurate, please use the corrections process.
Archive and answers
Past puzzles are available in the Yearbook archive. Archive pages are for replaying completed games, so individual puzzle pages stay out of search results. This guide never reveals the active answer. Streak and game state are kept in your browser, so clearing browser storage can affect saved local progress.
Behind Yearbook
Notes on the decisions, edge cases, and small systems behind the game.
- How a Yearbook Puzzle Gets MadeA look at how Hindsight Games turns a year into four sourced, progressively helpful Yearbook clues—and why the process got more complicated over time.
- What Makes a Good Yearbook Clue?Recognizability, nostalgia, fairness, difficulty, and the “oh yeah” moment behind a good Yearbook clue.
- How I Use AI in Yearbook — and What I Don’t Let It DecideHow AI helps word Yearbook clues while sources, facts, game design, QA, and final editorial judgment stay under human control.
- The Barbenheimer Problem: When the Source Is Right but the Answer Is WrongA small Yearbook edge case about why technically related sources can still produce the wrong reveal.