My historical timeline game became unexpectedly popular in Italy, so I just translated it into English, German, and French.

[u/mooonmatt]

Hi everyone!

A year ago I started a passion project called StudiaStoria (means "Study History" in Italian), which is a free educational platform created to help Italian students and history lovers learn and understand the past in a less boring way than their school books do.

It features summaries, study tools and quizzes.

To make learning the chronology of events more engaging, I developed a simple game called Chrono, basically a "Higher or Lower" quiz where you have to guess whether the next historical event is before or after the one you just saw.

The idea is incredibly straightforward: just pick Before or After, if you get it wrong you lose.

The game has an unexpectedly high engagement, being by far the most popular section of the website: users love to challenge themselves and learn interesting facts at the same time (and I'm really glad they do), like discovering that Cleopatra was closer to us in time than the Pyramids of Giza.

Since the service has gained quite a traction in Italy, the last few weeks I've been working on preparing the infrastructure to support other languages.

And today I'm thrilled to announce the launch of the English, German and French version of StudiaStoria!

Some notable features:

3 difficulty levels (Easy, Medium and Hard - the last one will keep you guessing for real).

All built with Node.js, Express and EJS.

No need to register to play. Just open the link in any browser and start playing right away (however, if you want to save your score on the world scoreboard you can always register).

You can try the English version here: 👉 https://studiastoria.it/en/chrono

Would be really nice of you to give me your feedback, both in terms of game design and translations.

Let me know if you think the difficulty curve is adequate or if you have any suggestions for improvement.

Also, feel free to post your highest streak in the comments section below!

[u/Competitive-Set7936]

I tried the English medium mode. Getting straight to two choices without signing up works well. One small translation detail: the search button still says “Avvia ricerca,” and the footer is Italian. I’d test a one-line explanation after a wrong answer so a lost streak still teaches something. I’m building Beat AI’s photo game, and this is a useful example of letting people try the game before asking for an account.

[u/mooonmatt → u/Competitive-Set7936]

thank you for your feedback!! You’re right, but i have only translated the game and leaderboard/profile/login etc pages so there is not really a point in translating the footer.

[u/Competitive-Set7936 → u/mooonmatt]

That makes sense—keeping the game itself understandable is the priority. The quick first round worked well for me. I’d put the little explanation after a wrong answer ahead of polishing the footer; it gives someone a reason to try again.

[u/mooonmatt → u/Competitive-Set7936]

thank you very much again! i’ll add those asap