How to play Gazillion

The idea in one paragraph

Each round shows you a single historical moment as a statement: “The first Moon landing”, “The first plants begin to grow on land”, “The first iPhone goes on sale”. Your job is to trap the year it happened inside a pair of brackets on a timeline that runs from the Big Bang to this morning. Get the truth inside your range and the closer the bracket, the more points you score. Lock in, find out the real date, and watch the pixel dinosaur react.

You cannot win by knowing one date. You win by knowing roughly where a moment sits in the story of everything, then framing it tightly. A round takes about forty seconds, and a full day is five rounds — roughly the length of a coffee. That is the whole loop of the Gazillion game: place the moment, tighten the range, learn the year.

Meet the timeline

The timeline is not a normal ruler. It is logarithmic, which means it gives roughly equal space to a week, a thousand years and a billion years. That is the only way 13.8 billion years of history can fit on one bar you can drag with a thumb. The four thousand years of recorded history sit in a tiny slice near the right end; the deep past takes up most of the bar.

The bar is divided into eight eras, from the Modern Era back to the Big Bang. As you drag the handles the colours shift, the labels relabel themselves, and the world behind the game morphs to match the era you are pointing at. You can use the handles, tap where you want a bracket to land, pinch or scroll to zoom, or switch to numeric inputs and type the years directly. There is no penalty for adjusting your range — the clock is the only pressure.

How scoring works

A round is worth up to 1,000 points, and a perfect day is 5,000. The exact figure depends on two things: whether the truth lands inside your bracket, and how tight that bracket was. A narrow hit scores near the maximum; a wide hit still scores, just less. Land just outside and the dino will give you a sympathetic look — the attempt is remembered as close, not useless.

The timer is 40 seconds per moment. If you are stuck, a hint narrows the problem and costs part of that round's maximum, so it is a real trade rather than free help. Every round ends with a tier — spot on, gold, silver, bronze, caught it, so close or missed — and your day ends with a total out of 5,000 and a time-travel band that decides how far back the dinosaur gets to travel. That band is cosmetic and brilliant; your score is the thing to beat.

One honest tip about ranges: a bracket that is three centuries wide in the Modern Era is not the same as a bracket three centuries wide in deep time. Zoom in before you lock. The timeline relabels its ticks as you zoom, so use that.

Four ways to play

Daily 5. The main event. The same five moments for everyone, one attempt per local day, with a fresh puzzle at midnight. Finish it and your streak grows. The daily is spoiler-safe by design: you never see a future puzzle early.

Unlimited. Endless rounds with three lives. Any round that scores zero costs a life, so it is a good place to learn the timeline without risking your streak.

Archive. Every daily puzzle in the season stays playable. Replays never touch your streak, so a missed Tuesday is not a tragedy — see the archive page for how it works.

Time Machine. An endless run filtered to the eras you choose. If the Middle Ages are your weak spot, practice nothing but the Middle Ages.

Around all of this sit the streak flame, a Time Passport that collects era stamps as you reach them, and a share card with your tier emojis. Play the Gazillion game and the rules will make sense within one round.

Five tips that actually help

1. Anchor to known events. Keep a few mental tent poles: the Moon landing in 1969, the Wright brothers in 1903, the printing press around 1450, the Western Roman Empire ending in 476, the first cities and writing around 5,000 years ago, the non-avian dinosaurs dying out about 66 million years ago.
2. Think in centuries first. Decide the century before the decade. Most statements give you a technology level or a political clue that narrows the era immediately.
3. Read the language. “Steam”, “telegraph”, “broadcast”, “smartphone” — the vocabulary of a moment dates it surprisingly well.
4. Then think in orders of magnitude. For deep time, do not think “what year”; think “which power of ten”. Was this 50,000 years ago, 50 million, or 500 million?
5. Lock with time left. A locked answer scores something; a timeout does not. If the clock is dying, commit to your best bracket.

Controls, phones and accessibility

Gazillion is built for a thumb and for a keyboard. On a phone, drag the handles, pinch to zoom and tap to aim; targets are sized for touch. On a desktop, the timeline responds to drag, wheel zoom and keyboard arrows, and the game respects reduced-motion settings — the scene will stop shaking and the camera will stop flying, without hiding any information.

There is a sound toggle, a music toggle and a reduced-motion toggle in settings. Sound never starts before you interact with the page. All essential information is also announced to screen readers: round number, score, the moment and the result. The game is free, needs no account, and stores your progress locally in your browser — details are in the privacy policy.