Yesteryear

How do you play Yesteryear?

Yesteryear is our own daily game: we pick a year from living memory — anywhere from 1935 to 2016 — and give you five clues, one at a time, from gently vague to dead giveaway. We accept guesses from 1930 to 2020, so don’t rule out a year just because it feels too early or too recent for what you’re picturing.

Guess the year and we’ll steer you earlier or later, like a warm hand on the tiller, and reveal the next clue. Get it in one or two guesses and you’ve earned the right to be insufferable about it at tea; use all five and you still get the year, and a little story behind it, at the end.

What’s the best tactic for guessing the year?

Halve the range rather than guess for luck. Your first guess shouldn’t try to be right — it should split the decades roughly down the middle, so the earlier-or-later steer tells you at once which half of the bank you’re in. Guess again in the middle of that half, and by the third clue you’re usually within a handful of years.

Let the clues date themselves, too: a wireless comedy points to the 1940s or 1950s, anything described as being “in colour” pushes you past the mid-1960s, decimal money means 1971 or later, and a home computer or a big shoulder pad puts you safely in the 1980s. The clues are written to sharpen as they go — clue one sets a mood, clue five is close to unmissable — so if an early clue feels frustratingly vague, that’s deliberate, not unfair.

Why is Yesteryear good to play down the phone with family?

Because it’s one of the only games where the older player holds a genuine advantage: a grandchild can look 1966 up in seconds, but a grandparent was there for it. Read the clues aloud over the phone and the game plays itself — every clue is an invitation to a story, and the earlier-or-later bickering (“it’s obviously before the wedding, we had the telly by then”) is really the whole point of playing together.

There’s a share button once you’ve finished, so you can send your result and compare guesses by text without needing to describe the whole game first. Our guide to sharing the daily puzzle by phone has more ways to turn a single daily puzzle into a standing call, and if it’s grandchildren rather than old friends on the other end, puzzles to do with your grandchildren explains why Yesteryear in particular tends to go down well across the generations.

Are the clues real history?

Yes — every clue is a true, hand-checked piece of history, not an invented trivia fact dressed up to sound plausible. We only use events, films, songs and front-page moments that actually happened in the year given, and we check them before they go into the bank rather than trusting memory or a single source.

That matters more in a game built entirely on nostalgia than it would in an ordinary quiz: get a fact wrong here and you’re not just losing a point, you’re rewriting someone’s actual memory of the year. New to the game? Our one-minute guide and guessing tactics covers the rules and the halve-the-range trick in full.

Where can I play more decades of Yesteryear?

Today’s game is one year, chosen for you — but if a session leaves you wanting more, Yesteryear by decade lets you pick any decade in the bank and play through every year we have for it, one after another, with the same five clues and the same earlier-or-later steering. It’s practice only: nothing is saved between years, and it never touches today’s official puzzle or your streak.

It’s a good fit for a longer group session, or simply an afternoon spent working through the 1960s or the 1980s year by year. And if you’d rather have a stack of past puzzles to hand than a screen, the answers archive keeps every day’s Yesteryear playable since launch, while the free printable pack gives you seven fresh Yesteryear cards a week to work through on paper. Our Yesteryear printable sheets shelf has individual guess-the-year sheets by decade, each with the answer at the back, if you’d like to build your own set.