How the daily puzzle works

Every day at midnight Eastern Time, a new set of ten artifacts is chosen from our curated Met Open Access pool (2,353 objects). Everyone who plays that day sees the same ten rounds.

Selection

• A deterministic seed from the calendar date picks ten artifacts so the set is stable for the whole day.
• Sets aim for variety across Met departments, world regions, and era bands (ancient → modern) when possible.
• Preference goes to artifacts with sharper answer pins (city / site / culture). Broad department-level fallbacks are capped (at most one per daily set), and Unknown-culture coarse pins are avoided when possible.
• Artifacts that appeared in recent daily puzzles are deprioritized for variety.

Scoring

Each round scores up to 5,000 points for map location and 5,000 for era accuracy. You choose a 250-year block on the timeline — overlap with the correct period earns the highest time score.

Location scoring softens when the answer pin is only a culture-area or department estimate (precision grace), so you are not punished for missing a vague centroid by a few hundred kilometers. Recap cards show the pin precision for each round.

After you play

The recap screen shows where each object was made, your guess vs the correct range, and links to learn more on The Met website. Past sets stay in the archive.

Puzzle day boundary: America/New_York (US Eastern).