How to Play HistoryQuest
Learn how to guess cities from historical clues, use the globe or map, and earn up to 5,000 points in a free HistoryQuest round.
Play a free round →Five clues. Five cities. One round.
HistoryQuest is a free browser game that combines history trivia with geography. Each question describes a person, invention, cultural moment or event. Your job is to locate the city connected to that specific story.
Start a random round from the lobby, or choose one of the six quiz topics. Read the clue before selecting a location: the question may ask where something was invented, where an event happened or where a person was born. Those are different kinds of connections.
- Read the question and identify the event it asks about.
- Rotate the globe or switch to the flat map. Zoom in to place your pin accurately.
- Select a location, then press Guess.
- Watch the answer reveal and compare your guess with the correct city.
- Read the explanation and follow the source link. After five questions, view your results.
How the distance score works
Each question is worth up to 1,000 points. A guess within 10 km of the answer earns the maximum. Beyond that, points fall quickly with distance: knowing the right continent is much less valuable than finding the right city. A perfect five-question round is 5,000 points.
The distance is the shortest surface distance between the two pins. It is not the length of a road trip or a flight route. The following examples use the actual game scoring formula.
| Distance from the city | Points out of 1,000 |
|---|---|
| 10 km | 1000 |
| 50 km | 819 |
| 100 km | 638 |
| 250 km | 301 |
| 500 km | 86 |
| 1,000 km | 7 |
A useful way to reason through a clue
First ask what happened, then ask where. A musician may have been born in one city, performed in another and recorded an important album somewhere else. The clue names the connection you need.
Once you have a likely city, use country borders, state boundaries and city labels to narrow your pin. If you only know the region, make your best guess and use the explanation to learn the missing connection.
Guest play, accounts and saved scores
You can play for free without creating an account. Google sign-in is optional. Your personal-best summary and recent results currently stay in the browser where you play; signing in does not yet move that history between devices.
Questions are randomly selected from a bank of 500 clues. New rounds can include a question you have seen before, so use the explanation to improve your next guess.