Five moments in history. Pin where each one happened.
Milestone is a daily history map quiz. Each question describes a real moment, such as a discovery, an invention, a battle, a sporting first or an ancient site, and you drop a pin on the map where you think it happened. Every daily has five questions, the same for everyone, each worth up to 1,000 points, and 3,500 out of 5,000 reaches the day’s milestone and wins. After each answer you learn what happened there, with sources. Unlimited mode serves one question after another whenever you want more.
One question reads: “Orville and Wilbur Wright made the first powered, controlled aeroplane flights on 17 December 1903. Where?” The map opens over North America. Many people know “Kitty Hawk”, but fewer know where it is. It is on the Outer Banks, the long chain of barrier islands off the coast of North Carolina. The flights actually took place at Kill Devil Hills, a few kilometres south of the village.
A pin on the Outer Banks scores close to the full 1,000. A pin in Dayton, Ohio, the brothers’ home town where they built the aircraft, is about 850 km away and scores under 100. That is the trap the question sets. After you answer, the card explains why they chose the site (wind and soft sand dunes) and that the first flight lasted 12 seconds, with a link to the Wikipedia articles used to check the location.
Each question has its own precision, a radius within which a pin scores the full 1,000 points. It is small for a single building or battlefield (from 12 km) and wider for events spread over a region (up to 80 km). Beyond that radius the score decays smoothly with distance. For a typical 20 km question, a pin 100 km away scores about 780, 250 km about 490, 500 km about 220 and 1,000 km under 50. The radius for the question in front of you is shown on screen.
Five questions make a maximum of 5,000, and 3,500 reaches the milestone. That works out at an average of 700 per question, so you can afford one bad miss if the rest are close, but not two. Distances are measured along the surface of the Earth, so they are correct anywhere on the globe.
Read the whole clue before touching the map. Questions usually carry more than one hint: a name, a date, a nationality, a nearby landmark. “Founded by Fatima al-Fihri in 859” points to the medieval Islamic world. “Recognised as the oldest continually operating university” narrows it to Fez, in Morocco.
Use the opening view. The map starts zoomed on the region the question is about, which can be a single country or the whole world. It is not the answer, but it frames the search. If the map opens on East Africa, the question is not about Peru. Then zoom in before you commit. At world scale the width of a fingertip covers hundreds of kilometres, which can cost several hundred points on a tight question.
The library has 172 questions across ten categories: history, archaeology, science, invention, sport, firsts, exploration, nature, engineering and culture. They run from 3300 BC to 2023. Each one was written for Milestone. The answer’s coordinates were checked against the place’s Wikipedia article, and the article links are shown after you answer, so you can read the full story.
Every daily draws five questions in a fixed order, the same for everyone. Unlimited mode serves the rest of the library one question at a time, with a running score and average, and always holds back that day’s five so practising can never spoil the daily.