How to Play Yesteryear, Our Guess-the-Year Game
The rules of Yesteryear in one minute, gentle tactics for narrowing down the year, and why it's the best puzzle to play down the phone with family.
How do you play Yesteryear?
Each day we pick one year from living memory — the 1930s to the 2010s — and give you five clues about it, one at a time, running from gently vague to dead giveaway. Type a year and guess: if you're wrong, we tell you whether the answer is earlier or later and show the next clue. Find the year within five guesses and you've won; the fewer clues you needed, the sweeter the victory. Either way, the day ends with a little story about the year worth passing on at tea.
Every clue is a true, hand-checked piece of history — no trick questions, no obscure records, just the films, songs, royal occasions, sporting afternoons and front-page moments that people actually remember.
What's the best tactic for guessing the year?
Halve the range. Your first guess shouldn't try to be right — it should split the likely decades. Guess 1970, and the earlier/later steer instantly tells you which half of the century you're in; guess the middle of that half next, and by the third clue you're usually within a handful of years while other players are still admiring clue one.
Then let the clues date themselves: a wireless comedy suggests the forties or fifties; anything 'in colour' pushes past the mid-sixties; decimal money means 1971 or later; a home computer puts you in the eighties. The clue order matters too — clue one is written to feel like a whole era, and clue five to be unmistakable. If clue three has a name in it, trust the name.
Why is Yesteryear good to play with family?
Because it's the rare game where the older player holds the advantage honestly: a granddaughter can look 1966 up, but her grandfather was there. Read the clues aloud down the phone or across the kitchen table and the game plays itself — every clue is an invitation to a story, and the earlier/later bickering ('it's obviously before the wedding, we had the telly by then') is the actual point.
There's a share button at the end for comparing scores by text — one tap, no app. A standing family fixture of 'who got the year first' has rescued many a Sunday call from the weather report.