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The daily one

Order Up

Six things that happened. Put them in order.

Play Order Up free, in your browser. No download and no account needed. One puzzle a day, six events, four tries, played on your own.

Six things that happened, handed to you in the wrong order with the dates torn off. You get four tries. There is a new one every morning, and it is the same one everybody else is getting.

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6 events
No dates on them. The order is the whole puzzle.
4 tries
The ones you got right lock. The rest come back to you.
1 a day
New at midnight Central, and the same six for everybody.
0 accounts needed
Sign in only if you want the streak kept for you.

How a puzzle goes

Read the ticket, put it in order, ring it in.

There is no scoring system to learn and nothing to unlock. You either get the order right or you find out which parts you had backwards.

  1. Six events come up on the menu

    Scrambled, and with nothing telling you when any of them happened. Oldest goes at the top, most recent at the bottom.

  2. You put them in order

    Drag them, or move them with the arrow keys. Nothing is judged while you are still deciding — rearrange as long as you like.

  3. Ring it in

    Now it is graded. Every event sitting in the right spot turns green and stays put. Everything else comes back for another go.

  4. You get four tickets in all

    Your score for the day is how many you used. Solve it on the first and that is a good morning. Miss on the fourth and the menu still tells you every date, and what each one actually was.

A little history

The eleven days that never happened.

This game asks you to put events in the order they happened, which sounds like it should be a settled question. It is not always. In September 1752, Britain and its colonies went to bed on Wednesday the 2nd and woke up on Thursday the 14th. Eleven days were skipped on purpose.

The Calendar (New Style) Act 1750 moved Britain from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian one, which Catholic Europe had adopted back in 1582. By 1752 the old calendar had drifted eleven days out of step with the sun, and the only way to close a gap like that is to delete it. The same Act quietly did something stranger: it moved New Year’s Day from the 25th of March to the 1st of January, which left 1751 as a year that ran from March to December and lasted 282 days.

You may have heard that crowds rioted, demanding their eleven days back. There is no good evidence any of that happened. The story appears to have been read backwards out of a Hogarth painting from 1755, in which a placard on the floor of a chaotic election dinner reads “Give us our Eleven Days” — a jab at a political opponent, not a report of a protest.

The mess it left behind is real, though, and it is the reason a date can be a genuinely hard question. For three and a half centuries Europe kept two calendars at once. Russia did not switch until 1918, which is why the October Revolution happened in November. Greece held out until 1923. Two events on opposite sides of a border could be dated eleven days apart and have happened on the same afternoon.

Still reading?

That is exactly the problem we built this to solve.

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