I have been broadening the number of online daily games I play lately, and I really want to recommend one of them, because I want to compare my scores with more people and talk about the game. You should be playing Anthropeum, is what I’m getting at. Here’s how it works: you are presented with ten artifacts, and the material said artifacts are made of. A lot of the time, you’ll have more than one view of the artifact, so you can get multiple angles or whatever, but sometimes it’s just the one shot.

Your job is to place the artifact on a map of the world, and nail down where it came from within a 250-year range. You get points based on how close you came on either axis, with a possible 10,000 points per item if you get both completely correct. You have three hints available; the hints will give you either the date within a thousand year range (more helpful than you might think) or a verbal description of the location, such as “Mesoamerica” or “West Africa”. You can get both if you want but that will use two hints.

I am absolutely terrible at this game and I am enjoying the hell out of it. I am allowing myself some limited research– if an artifact is described as being made of a certain kind of stone, you can sure as hell bet that I’m going to see if that stone is only found in a particular part of the globe, for example– but realistically you can find every item on the list with a reverse image search and I’m not about to do that. My best day was two days ago, where I was in the top 9% of all players worldwide. Interestingly, my highest score was about 75,000 (remember the maximum score would be 100K) but that gave me a lower percentile than the day I was in the top 9%. I had a day where I was in the bottom decile.

The two items up there that you have no clue about are a winged pendant from (roughly) pre-Colombian Colombia and a spoon, 15th or 16th century, from Nigeria. If I remember correctly (and it’s too bad that at the moment the site won’t let you go back and look at old games) I had the luckiest guess in history on the pendant and did absolutely atrociously on the spoon.

Anyway, go play and tell me how you did.