Who Were We?

You know this face. Everyone knows this face. So why won't the name come? The smoke thins and a portrait comes through it, painted and lit like an old oil, waiting. You have about ten seconds before knowing the answer stops being worth very much. THE FACE IS THE EASY PART Say the name and the questions keep coming. What were they — a physicist, a conqueror, a poet? What did they actually do with the life? And when did they live, to the century? Four questions about one portrait, and each one only opens if you took the last. Recognizing somebody is not the same as knowing them, and this is the game that tells you which of the two you have been doing all these years. HESITATION IS THE ONLY THING THAT COSTS YOU Every question is worth 1000 the instant it appears, and it bleeds down towards 100 while you sit there weighing it up. Answer from the gut and a round pays 4000. Deliberate, double-check, change your mind at the last moment — the same four correct answers pay 400. The score is not measuring whether you knew. It is measuring whether you knew straight away. Guess wrong and the smoke closes over them. That one is gone. Ten rounds in a game — next face. TWO HUNDRED PEOPLE WORTH KNOWING Forty each from science, the ancient world, politics and revolution, art and architecture and music, literature and philosophy. Isaac Newton and Nefertiti, Ada Lovelace and Genghis Khan, Frida Kahlo and Marcus Aurelius. And no free passes. The wrong names come from the same field as the right one, and the wrong dates are other people's real lives. Nothing on the screen rules itself out. You either know it or you are gambling. EIGHT HUNDRED MEDALS, AND ONE THAT HURTS Bronze, silver and gold for every one of the 200 — and master, which takes three flawless rounds of the same person back to back with nothing dropped in between. Every medal also remembers the fastest speed you earned it at, so there is always a better version of a medal you already have. Nothing you win is ever taken back off you. THE GAME KNOWS WHO YOU ARE AVOIDING It deals the people you have least to show for first. Nobody comes round twice while somebody has not come round once. Meet all 200 and it goes hunting for who still owes you a bronze, then a silver, then a gold. The percentage on the front screen is the share of the table you can honestly say you have the measure of, and it is going to be a small number for a while. EASY, NORMAL, FAST Same questions, same 1000 points, less time. Three separate boards, one row per person, best first — so a slow, careful, magnificent score cannot go and hide on the fast one. AND THE GALLERY All 200 portraits at full size, with what each of them is remembered for. Study before a game, or go and make peace with somebody after one. No account, no sign-in, nothing locked behind anything. Who were we? Have a look in the smoke.