Time Trail: the country-by-country guide

450 questions. 15 countries. One dotted line across an old paper map.

Time Trail is MiniBreak's biggest game: a journey through the history of 15 countries, from the United Kingdom to Brazil. Each country is a level of 30 questions played over a hand-drawn parchment map, and finishing one unlocks the next flag on the trail. This guide walks the whole route — what each country actually asks about, how the five question formats work, and how to come home with three stars.

How a level works

Every country opens with an intro card: the flag, the capital, the language, three things the country is famous for, its place on the map, and a short story. Read it — the story quietly primes one or two of the answers you're about to meet. Then come the 30 questions, each against a 30-second antique hourglass. You have five hearts: a wrong answer costs one, and letting the sand run out costs one too. Lose all five and the level restarts — but your progress saves after every question, so a level is something you can chip away at across a day of small breaks.

The questions come in five formats, mixed through every country:

• Duels — two events, two dates hidden. Which came first?
• True or false — a statement about the country. Believe it or don't.
• Multiple choice — four options, one right answer.
• Before or after — one event, one famous anchor date. Did it happen before or after?
• Name the landmark — a photograph of somewhere famous. Where is it?

After every answer you get the story behind it — the date, the detail, the bit you'd tell someone else. A correct answer scores 100 points, and consecutive correct answers build a streak bonus of +10 per step, up to +50: a flawless country is worth 4,350 points. Stars are simpler and crueller — three stars means you finished without a mistake, and every mistake costs a star, down to a minimum of one for finishing at all.

The route, country by country

1. United Kingdom. The home start: London's landmarks, kings, queens and inventors. Roman walls and Norman castles at one end; the third London Olympics at the other. Watch the true-or-false questions — one of them concerns Scotland's national animal, and it rewards a second thought.

2. France. Cathedrals, kings and revolutions, with the Eiffel Tower keeping watch over several centuries of art, food and engineering. If you know when things were built in Paris, you'll do well here.

3. Spain. Explorers and artists, the Prado and Gaudí, the world's biggest tomato fight in Buñol and the first metro trains under Madrid in 1919.

4. Italy. The longest shadow in Europe: Roman engineering, Renaissance genius, a leaning tower finished in 1372 and a country that only became one country in 1861. The before-or-after questions love Italian dates.

5. Germany. Printing presses, composers, cars and Christmas markets. Gutenberg to the Striezelmarkt to the first automobile — a country of inventors, asked about in chronological self-defence.

6. Greece. Where the trail turns ancient: the first Olympic Games at Olympia, philosophers, temples, and a run from Marathon that gave a race its name. One year — 776 BC — is worth learning before you start.

7. Turkey. Empires layered on one city. Constantinople's great church that was the world's largest cathedral for nearly a thousand years, bazaars, straits, and a capital that is not the city you think it is.

8. Egypt. Pharaohs and pyramids, a terraced temple built by a queen, hieroglyphs that took a famous stone to unlock, and a capital founded in 969 that grew into one of the world's great cities.

9. India. Ancient cities, emperors and independence, and a space programme whose first satellite was named after a 5th-century astronomer. The scale changes here — some of these dates are very old indeed.

10. China. Dynasties and the four great inventions — paper, printing, gunpowder and the compass — plus a wall you may have heard of and trains that outrun aeroplanes' reputations.

11. Japan. Shoguns and castles, tea and temples, then the bullet train arrives and everything accelerates. The modern questions here move faster than the hourglass expects.

12. Australia. The oldest living culture on Earth, explorers and gold rushes, and a harbour city whose opera house sails took a decade to build. Watch for questions where "first" means fifty thousand years ago.

13. United States. Founding documents, westward wagons, light bulbs, flight and the space race — a young country whose questions cluster in a busy two centuries.

14. Mexico. Aztec and Maya cities raised on lakes and in jungles, independence, revolutionary art, and a flag whose centre tells the story of a capital's founding.

15. Brazil. The final flag: three capitals across five centuries, an architect who rebuilt a capital from scratch in 1960, football's kings, and a river system that dwarfs everything before it. Finish here and the map rolls out its last secret — the trail isn't finished growing.

Tips for a three-star run

• Read the intro card. It isn't decoration — the story primes real answers, and the "famous for" list is a fair summary of the level's obsessions.
• Protect the streak, not the clock. Thirty seconds is generous for most questions. The streak bonus is where the top scores live, so spend the sand on thinking, not speed.
• Learn the anchor dates. Before-or-after questions reuse the world's most famous dates — a moon landing, a tower in Paris, a certain ship's first smartphone rival. Each one you memorise pays out in every country that uses it.
• A timeout is just a wrong answer. If you're beaten, guess before the sand runs out — a guess keeps your chance, a timeout spends a heart for nothing.
• Come back later. Progress saves after every question and finished countries keep their stars. A fresh brain on the train home beats a tired one at midnight.

Questions about the game

How many questions are in Time Trail? 450 — 30 for each of the 15 countries. Are the facts checked? Yes: every question was researched against reference sources when its country pack was written, and in October 2026 all 450 went through a full audit that caught and fixed the errors we'd rather you never met. Will there be more countries? Yes — the end of the map says so, and it means it: our mapmakers are charting new lands for a future update. Is it free? Completely — no accounts, no downloads, progress saved on your own device.

Ready? Start Time Trail in the United Kingdom — or browse all our guides.