History

History is the category people expect to be a list of dates, and it is written specifically to avoid that. A question that asks for a year tests whether you happened to memorise a year. A question that asks why something happened, or what followed from it, tests whether you understood the period.

The questions span antiquity to the twentieth century, and they favour the moments where the interesting part is the mechanism: what a treaty actually changed, why an empire could no longer hold together, which invention made a particular way of life possible. Where a date does appear, it is usually because getting the order of events right is the point — knowing which came first is knowledge, knowing the exact year is bookkeeping.

History also has some of the widest difficulty spread of any category. The easy questions are close to general knowledge and most people get them. The hard ones assume you have read something beyond a school syllabus. If you are playing with a mixed group, this is a category worth combining with a lighter one rather than running on its own.

The estimation questions in history work differently again: instead of naming a year from four options, you estimate one directly and score by proximity. That turns "roughly when was this" from a coin flip into something you can reason about from context, which is much closer to how historical knowledge actually works.