EpochLens (Zalize)

EpochLens shows five real historical photographs a day, the same set for every player in the world, numbered from 1 July 2026 (#113 fell on 22 October). For each photo you set a year on a slider that runs from 1850 to 2010 and tap a world map where you think it was taken, then submit.

Scoring is spelled out on the page. The year is worth up to 5,000 points and falls away the further off you are (5,000 times e to the minus years off divided by 12), and the place is worth up to 5,000 more by distance (km away divided by 2,000), so a photo is worth 10,000 and a day 50,000. On the day we played, a guess one year off and about 1,350 km away scored 7,141.

Each reveal shows the right year and place on the map, a one-line fact about the moment and the photo's credit and licence. The photos are public domain or Creative Commons, from archives such as Wikimedia Commons and the Library of Congress. Every Sunday all five share a theme: recent ones were Aviation, Transportation, Engineering and Exploration. An archive button lets you play past days, and the result shares as an emoji line of year and distance marks.

Zalize Daily Games, at daily.zalize.com, is a free set of small browser games from zalize.com, each with one puzzle a day that is the same for everyone and changes at midnight UTC. There is no account: streaks and statistics stay in your browser and move to another device with a sync code. The screens come in English, German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean and Chinese.

It suits players of TimeGuessr or WhenTaken who want a free five-photo round that works as well on a phone as on a desktop.