About Histdrop

One day in history, every day. One life. No retries.

What it is

Every day, the river of history drops you into one real moment from the past — a specific place, on a specific day, when everything was about to change. You arrive as yourself, with one unfair advantage: you know what happens next, and the people around you don't.

Everyone who plays on the same day gets the same drop. A new drop arrives at your local midnight, wherever in the world you are. On our first day, the river carried everyone to Pompeii, on the last evening before the eruption. Tomorrow it will be somewhere else entirely — the river doesn't say where in advance.

How to play

1. Step into the river. Read where — and when — you have landed, and who you are there.
2. Answer five questions. Some test what you know about what is about to happen. Some are plain common sense for the era you are standing in. One asks you to estimate a real number — how long, how many, how far — and scores you by how close you land to the truth.
3. Every choice locks. The moment you answer, the choice is made and the record shows you what it set in motion. There is no going back to change an answer — the past doesn't allow it either.

How endings work

Your five choices are weighed together and place you in that era's society — the life you would most likely have lived. Play it well and you might end the day among the top one percent of that world: a person of wealth, rank, or power. Play it badly and the century is unforgiving — poverty, exile, or a sudden death, which in some eras is only one wrong door away. Some days have a ceiling: not every moment in history lets a nobody rise to the very top. And some days hide a special ending, waiting on one particular path through the questions. It doesn't announce itself. You find it, or you don't.

Your standing is labelled "so far today" — because the day is still being lived by other travellers, and where you stand rests on everyone who has played up to that moment.

One life per day

There are no retries. When your day in the past is lived, it is history, and the river moves on. The next day, the previous drop's answers are published — you can read the questions again, see the choices you didn't take, and learn what the record says about each one.

Come back daily and you build a streak, kept in your own browser. Miss a day and the streak resets — the river waits for no one.

Why we made it

History is usually taught as dates and outcomes, which makes it feel settled — as if everyone at the time could see what was coming. They couldn't. We wanted to know what a famous moment felt like from inside, at street level, with no more knowledge than you could carry in your own head. Histdrop is that experiment, once a day: you know the future, you know nothing about surviving the past, and five small decisions decide which one matters more.