A full guide: undated events, entering a year, the timeline, points for hitting accuracy, timer and skip, controls on muta.pro and tips on how to score the maximum.
"Guess the Year" is a fun party game of erudition. A game runs 10 rounds, and in each you have to name the year when the shown event happened: a film came out, a hit played, an invention appeared or a famous fact occurred. The closer your year is to the real one, the more points you get. The winner is the one who scores the highest total across all ten rounds.
You can play alone or with a group of up to 8 people. On muta.pro three bots sit down at the table with you — the Archivist, Chronos and the Scholar — so competition starts right away. On the left of the screen is the "pts" score table, a progress bar of completed rounds and the room chat. There's no need to negotiate or peek at opponents' answers: everyone answers for themselves.
At the start of a round a card appears on screen: an icon, a name and a short hint about the event — but no year. It could be a film, a song, an invention or a historical fact.
Enter the year you think it was in the "Enter year" field and press the "Answer" button. Your answer is locked in and can no longer be changed.
After you answer, the timeline opens. Every player's guesses are marked with coloured tags, and a golden tag shows the correct year — you can see at once who was closest.
The closer your year is to the right one, the more points you get. An exact hit gives the maximum, a small error almost as much, and a wild miss brings very little.
You get 25 seconds per round: the timer turns red toward the end, and when it runs out your answer is locked automatically. Not sure — press "⏭ Skip", but then you get 0 points for the round.
After the tenth round the points are added up. The player with the highest total takes first place and claims the cup 🏆.
Points are awarded by the accuracy of your guess. An exact hit on the year is marked as "🎯 Bullseye!" and gives the maximum — up to 1250 points. An error of 1–3 years is "🔥 Almost perfect", a miss of 4–12 years is "👍 Close", and 13 years or more is "📉 Off". The bigger your error, the fewer points, and skipping a round gives zero. After 10 rounds the final totals are compared: the one with more wins. There's no luck here — it all comes down to erudition.
Even a rough guess beats a skip: "Off" gives few points, but a skip gives exactly zero.
Don't remember the exact year — estimate the decade. Landing within 1–3 years already brings almost the maximum.
When the field turns red, it's time to answer: after 25 seconds your answer locks itself, whatever it is.
After a round, look at where the golden tag was — that's how you quickly memorize dates for future games.
In "Guess the Year" the winner isn't the one who knows all the dates by heart, but the one who manages uncertainty cleverly. The scoring system is non-linear: an error of 1–3 years is almost equal to an exact hit, while anything beyond 12 years collapses the reward. So your task is not to "hit the year" but to hit the ±3 window around the real date.
Think of each answer as a bet with a different cost of error. A year you're sure of is worth naming exactly; a year you only have a vague feeling about — round toward the safe centre of the era. There's no need to mix these two approaches in one round: first assess how firmly you know the date, and only then choose whether to gamble or play safe.
Don't remember the exact year — name the middle of the likely decade, not its edge. From the 1990s pick 1995, not 1991 or 1999: that way the maximum error in either direction is minimal.
Anchor the event to something you remember exactly: the collapse of the USSR — 1991, the first iPhone — 2007, the launch of YouTube — 2005. Count "give or take a couple of years" from the anchor instead of guessing from scratch.
Remember the thresholds: 1–3 years — "almost perfect", 4–12 — "close", 13+ — "off". If you hesitate between two years inside the ±3 window, the point difference is tiny — don't waste seconds on it.
An invention and its mass recognition are different dates. A card usually asks about the triggering event (premiere, release, the drop of a hit), not the long road to it. Aim for the moment that "made a splash".
The golden cell is the correct year, the blue ones are the ±1 window: betting on the centre of the decade almost always lands in the "almost perfect" zone.
While a round is on, others' answers are hidden — but afterwards the timeline reveals everything. It's not just the payoff: it's a source of data on how your opponents (and the bots) think, and a hint about where you systematically go wrong.
If your tag on the timeline is repeatedly to the left of the golden one — you consistently underestimate dates. Start adding 3–5 years to your guesses and check whether it gets closer.
The Archivist, Chronos and the Scholar hold different levels. If a strong bot has pulled far ahead, take a risk on disputable cards — cautious play only guarantees second place.
Leading by a big margin a round or two before the end — play safe, toward the centre of the era. Behind — strike bolder for the exact year: only the maximum for a round will bring you back into the race.
The card category is itself a hint. Technology and the internet almost always pull toward the last 30 years, worldwide film premieres toward the 20th century, and historical facts can lead back centuries. Before entering a number, ask yourself: in which era could this type of event physically have happened? By cutting off the clearly impossible years, you narrow the spread even before you start recalling the specific date.
It's also useful to keep the rhythm of the game itself in mind. Ten rounds run mixed across eras, so don't carry over inertia: if the last card was about the 1970s, that says nothing about the next. Assess each year with a clean slate, and use the previous round's timeline only as a lesson about your bias, not as a guide for the new guess.
A game is a fixed 10 rounds of 25 seconds, but you can play them very differently. The makeup of the table and the agreements determine whether it will be a light warm-up or a tense duel of experts. The format is the same, but the feel and the optimal tactics change radically depending on how many opponents sit beside you.
A quick mode for training: you and three bots. Ideal for getting the hang of anchors and eras without the pressure of live opponents and to get a feel for the scoring.
Invite a friend by room code — and every wrong year becomes costly. At a small table it's not knowledge in general that decides, but accuracy on the disputable cards.
The more people, the wider the spread of tags on the timeline and the more fun the finish. A lead in one lucky round is easily overturned in the next.
Agree to count only "🎯 Exact" and "🔥 Almost" — the ±3 window — in the personal standings. Everything beyond is zero. The game instantly turns into a test of real knowledge.
Split into pairs and confer in a whisper before one "captain" answers. Discussing anchors out loud is half the fun and noticeably more accurate than a lone guess.
Points in "Guess the Year" are more often lost not through ignorance, but through haste and psychology. Here are the traps that cost whole games — and all of them are cured by simple answer discipline.
The first touch — enter a reasonable estimate as soon as you see the card. The second — refine it if time remains. That way you're insured against last-second panic.
Wavering between two years inside the ±3 window isn't worth a single point, yet it eats up the timer. You picked the centre of the era — lock it in and don't replay.
A blue tag at the edge of the decade (1990) when the truth is 1996 is already "off": a distance of six years instead of one.