What is Timeguessr?
If you've been on the internet for a while, you've probably heard of geoguessr. Timeguessr is essentially just geogussr but a little bit harder, with the addition of figuring out the year alongside the location! However instead of exploring via google earth, you are given a static photo you can zoom in and investigate.
You get scored based on how close your location pin is to the actual location of the photo, as well as how close your year gyess is to the photo. Each game contains 5 rounds, with each score cateogry allowing you up to 5000 points.
Game Modes
This is a short section but it's good context. There are two main game modes, the daily and then a normal 'freeplay' mode. Each of these modes has five rounds, so five photos you need to guess the location and year for. Now as an aside, the normal freeplay mode does have a timed version and a non-timed version. I typically don't play the timed because I aim for accuracy over speed, but it's all personal preference!
Extra Notes
Keep in mind, a lot of these external sites are geoguessr specific and do talk a lot about Meta. Meta in this context are clues that tell you when and where something could be, based on the available tchnology at the time in that region. A prime example for this are cars and those camera quality indicators I mentioned up above(for google maps photos).
External Guides and Communities
This section just contains any external links I find for timeguessr (and in turn, geoguessr) guides and communities that may prove helpful. Pretty much all of the guides for geoguessr you can find online will help you here, with the exception of the rule about camera generations and quality for google maps photos in various regions, since these are static photos and not from google maps. If you don't know what I mean by that then don't worry about it, you'll know when you see it.
PlonkIt - THE site for geoguessr guides. If you only plan to play tiemguessr, you can more or less ignore any of the parts of the guides that talk about the geoguessr UI and game modes. Outside of that, there's a ton of really useful tips based on architecture and environment (like down to dirt colors, insanely helpful if you're not playing with someone who's been in half of Europe like I am.) They also have guides on a country by country basis, which is extremely handy for modern day photos, and still useful in older ones too.. I won't talk too much on them since a lot of tips are on their site, and I'll be dropping my own down below too.
GeoGuessr- The Top Tips, Tricks and Techniques - Just a guide on someones blog. It's a bit older but has a lot of good information in it
GeoHints - A nice and organized hint database for geoguessr. Has Categories for a lot of diff things, like License plates, utility poles and traffic lights, and even web domains (Great hints for billboards nad newspapers, ads, ec.)
geometas More meta hints for geoguessr. Organized into tgs and by country so you can look around however you want
Timeguessr subreddit. just the timeguessr subreddit!
Max's Guides and Tips
This section is mostly my own notes I took for timeguessr. My husband, Tocirah, and I play this game nightly together. He focuses on the location typically, while I focus a bit more on the year. This is just mostly because he was previously living in Europe and got the privelege of being able to travel for vacations all over the place. He also admittedly watches a lot more tv and movies than I do, I don't know wehre literally anything is because I never leave the house. The history for me was just because I've always been obsessed with trends in culture, including fashion and technology. Together we actually score really really well, at least in comparison to our solo scores.
Things I suggest learning or reseearching!
This is also my list I'm working through slowly myself to improve my scores for the time!
- Cars by decade
- Learn your wars, big and small, there's more pics from them on there than you think.
- Fashion! hair and clothes are big indicators of time AND location.
- Us presidents. I dont care if you live in the US or not, learn their faces. This is genuinely my LOWEST scoring type of photo because despite living here my whole life, i have no idea what these old ass white men look like
- Olympics Years and Locations! I never remember where they have them or what years are winter vs summer so I end up having to remember the most recent one and count back to hope for the year
- Queen Elizabeth. This is not a joke. She was born in 1926, lived to be almost 100. Knowing roughly what she looked like at different decades in her life is helpful because I swear to god I see her on there at least twice a week, if not more.
- General technology advancements. I'll go into more detail on this below, but learn when different types of utility and light poles changed from one iteration to a next will also help narrowing down years.
- License Plates! these vary by country AND by time, so New York State License plates might look one way today, but be completly different 50 years ago.
- Language Identification. You don't need to be able to read every language, but being able to tell what the language is, or would be related to, is also super helpful for narrowing down a location. I can't tell you how many times I get stuck when it comes to eastern-asian countries that have a different alphabet than the one I use. Also learn which languages use double vowels, certain diacritics (aka accent marks), etc.
Decade Hints
This section will slowly be updated as I finish my own research, in the mean time check out the above links in the external guides section!
Cars by Decade
This section will have content added later