this game could become a time sink

[Posted on June 22, 2026, at around 2:40 a.m.]

New game, found on an ex-friend's blog (yeah, I do still visit; he's no longer a friend, but he's a top-notch intellect and a great writer except when he's being an asshole).

I played a single 10-round session, using no hints (you're allowed three), and scored in the top 12% of players for the day. Don't ask me how I did it; I talked to myself a lot.

Turns out I'm either not bad at this game, or I benefitted from beginner's luck.

My score: 70,495 out of a possible 100,000, so by Fairfax County standards in the 1980s, a D+. Bravo, Kevin! But a D+ was enough to put me in the top 12% of the day's players.

Anthropeum.com · Jun 22 2026

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70,495 · top 12% of players today!

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Results 5-10

Important numbers: distance error, time error, and final score for each round. Ten rounds, and you get a total score for the game.

The object of the game is to guess the where and the when of a piece of art on display.

From the website—

How to Play:

Each daily game features ten artifacts from the Met's collection. For each artifact, you place a pin on a map (your best guess at where it was made) and select a time period. Points are based on how close you get on both dimensions. After your 10 rounds, you'll see your score on a distribution curve of everyone who played that day.

A Note on Balance:

The Met's collection skews heavily European. That bias would otherwise dominate the game: far more 17th-century Dutch paintings than sub-Saharan metalwork or pre-Columbian ceramics. My goal is to create an experience where players encounter cultures and objects they'd rarely find elsewhere. The game can feel difficult, but that is intentional. The dataset has been weighted to reflect a broader range of cultures and time periods. Some regions remain underrepresented even so, not because their material cultures are less rich, but because less of their heritage has been digitized, catalogued, or made openly accessible. I will continue to improve this coverage.

A Note on Provenance:

Many of these objects were taken from their home countries through colonialism, looting, or coercion. Showing them here isn't an endorsement of how that happened. The object and the history of how it got here are both worth knowing.

A Note on Historical Geography:

Historical boundaries are heavily contested. Fixed territory and national borders are largely modern inventions; civilizations and cultures existed on gradients, overlapping and shifting across centuries. The regions shown here are approximations drawn from historical cartography and scholarly consensus, not declarations of political fact.

__________

I talked out loud to myself the whole time, trying to reason things out based on what clues I saw. If the artistic medium was paper, for example, I knew the object couldn't be that old because paper can last centuries if well preserved, but rarely lasts millennia undamaged. I looked for situations and symbolism; I looked for weird flaws in the art. I figured out the era of one East Asian piece of art by the fact that it was a framed bit of calligraphy, not a scroll as would have been normal in the olden days. A frame would also indicate Western influence, which affects what era to aim for when guessing dates.

It occurred to me that my ex-boss, a certified antiques expert, might love this game.

The game is basically a variation of Geoguessr, which I used to love playing until it became a subscriber/member thing. In Geoguessr, you're given a Google Maps street view of some random location somewhere in the world. You're allowed to use Street View-style navigation to figure out things like nearby geographical features, the language on road signs, the shapes and colors of license plates, local plant life, geographical features, cultural landmarks, etc.—allowing you to reason outward until you can give a rough or accurate guess as to where you started. You then drop a map pin on the location you think you're at, and depending on how close you are, you get awarded more or fewer points.

In this game, Anthropeum, you have to guess both the rough location of the artifact and the era it hails from. Close guesses get more points, up to 10,000 for a perfect guess. You get a series of ten objects, so a perfect score is 100,000. What you see above is my first-ever try at the game. I think I did okay for not being able to read Arabic and not being an art expert. A lot of this is just common sense. What cultures liked gold filigree? If the medium of a carving is "walrus ivory" (the medium of each piece of art is automatically given, not a hint, but a crucial part of the puzzle), would you look anywhere in Africa for walruses (I made that mistake)? Is the facial shape or the skin color of the people depicted in the art a clue as to where the art had been made? In some cases, I got the era close to right (or right on the nose) but messed up the geography. In other cases, I got the general geography right, but timewise, I was off by a millennium. Twice, I made some truly embarrassing mistakes in terms of geography, but truth be told, I've never been good with geography.

Fascinating game, and easily a time sink. I can see myself becoming addicted, which is why I played just this one session. I'm stopping now. Go ahead and kick my ass if you can. 70,495 points. See if you can best me in a single try, and with NO HINTS the way I did.

NB: "the Met" refers to New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art.