Guess the Year
A film title, a poster, and a year to name. This is the only game here that pays partial credit: exact is full marks, one year off is 60 per cent, two years 35 per cent, three years 15 per cent. Four and you have burned a rung for nothing.
That scoring changes how it should be played. In every other game a guess is right or wrong; here a considered near-miss is worth more than a cautious clue purchase, because the clue costs 380 points and being one year out costs 400.
Guess the year a film came out.
Play Guess the YearDating a film without the year
The poster is the first evidence. Poster design moves in recognisable phases: painted illustration through the 1970s, the airbrushed photographic composite of the 1980s, the floating-heads-over-a-city-skyline of the 1990s, and the desaturated single-figure key art of the 2010s. Typography follows the same arc, from hand-lettered to condensed sans to the very thin modern faces.
Then the description clue, which is Wikipedia's own one-line summary with every year and decade stripped out of it — otherwise the first clue would read 2010 film by Christopher Nolan and end the round on the spot. What remains is usually a director's name or a country, and a director's active period is a decade-sized answer by itself.
The third clue gives the decade, and the fourth a five-year window. That window is deliberately off-centre: a symmetric one would hand over the answer as its midpoint, so the range starts somewhere between zero and four years before the real date. Take the middle of it and you will be one or two out, which still pays.
How the near-miss maths works
At the first rung a round is worth 1000. Exact pays all of it, one year off pays 600, two years 350 and three years 150. Buying the first clue drops the ceiling to 620, so an exact answer after one clue and a one-year miss with no clues are worth almost exactly the same.
Which means the right instinct is to commit early with your best estimate rather than to buy your way to certainty. The only situation where a clue is clearly worth it is when your uncertainty is wider than about four years, since outside that band a wrong guess scores nothing and costs a rung anyway.
The deck
The films come from the same 87-title list the trailer game uses, filtered to those released from 1930 onward, and the picker runs from 1930 to the current year. The list spans 1939 to 2023 with a median around 2002, so the deck is weighted towards the modern era — if you have no information at all, the middle of the 1990s is a better blind guess than the middle of the range.
Every year in that file was confirmed against the film's Wikipedia article rather than taken from memory, which matters in a game where being one year out is a scoring event.
Scoring
Ten rounds, four rungs: 1000, 620, 380, 240, multiplied by the accuracy fraction and then by the streak multiplier. A near-miss still counts as a won round for streak purposes, so a run of confident one-year misses keeps the multiplier climbing — which over ten rounds is worth more than two exact answers.