History · Quible

What Came First? A timeline quiz for history

What Came First? is the timeline game in Quible, a history and geography quiz for iPhone. You get four or five events, say the founding of Rome, the Great Pyramid and Pompeii, and drag them into order from earliest to latest. There are 75 rounds spanning ancient history to the last century.

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What Came First?

At a glance

rounds in the game
75
rounds per session
8
seconds per round
45
No lives
–

Try five real rounds

Straight from the app, same wording. Quib keeps score.

1 / 5

Place the events on the timeline

  • The fall of the Berlin Wall
  • The arrival of euro cash
  • The assassination of John F. Kennedy
  • The resignation of Richard Nixon after Watergate

Play the whole game in the browser

How does the timeline game work?

Quib deals several event cards. Hold a card and drag it into place; oldest on top. When you are happy, you lock the order in and see the real dates next to each card. There is no clock pressure beyond the round timer, so you can shuffle as long as you need.

Quib counts how many pairs of cards are in the right order to each other, so a nearly right order still earns points. On Easy, one swapped pair still counts as right.

How is it different from Before or After?

Before or After? asks about one event against one fixed date and is over in seconds. What Came First? makes you order several at once, which is harder: you need to know roughly when each happened, not just which side of a line it falls on.

Both are part of the World History chapter of the learning path. If you like timeline card games such as the tabletop game Timeline, this is the same idea on one phone.

What the rounds are about

Rounds per topic. One round can have more than one topic.

  • History75

Where it shows up in Quible

  • Path chapter 4: World History
  • Duel: not a duel game (it has its own flow)
  • Energy: a finished round costs one; Quible Plus makes it unlimited

The example rounds with answers

  1. Place the events on the timeline

    Answer: The assassination of John F. Kennedy (1963) → The resignation of Richard Nixon after Watergate (1974) → The fall of the Berlin Wall (1989) → The arrival of euro cash (2002). In 2002 the euro replaced the currency of twelve countries at once, the biggest cash changeover in history.

  2. What came first, what came last?

    Answer: The first Olympic Winter Games (1924) → The first soccer World Cup (1930) → The first Bundesliga season (1963) → Germany's World Cup title at home (1974). The 1924 winter games in Chamonix were only declared Olympic after the fact.

  3. Put the events in the right order

    Answer: The Boston Tea Party (1773) → The American constitution takes effect (1789) → The Louisiana Purchase (1803) → The end of the American Civil War (1865). The Louisiana Purchase doubled the country overnight, for 15 million dollars.

  4. Which one came first? Sort them.

    Answer: The completion of the Brandenburg Gate (1791) → The Olympic Games in Berlin (1936) → The opening of the Berlin TV Tower (1969) → The opening of Berlin's BER airport (2020). BER took 14 years to build. The Brandenburg Gate took three.

  5. Put the events in the right order

    Answer: India's independence (1947) → The Suez Crisis (1956) → Ghana's independence (1957) → Nelson Mandela is released from prison (1990). Ghana was the first colony south of the Sahara to become independent. Thirty others followed within ten years.

What people also ask

How many rounds does the timeline quiz have?
75 rounds, each with its own set of events.
Can I play it with friends?
Not in the duel: ordering rounds have their own flow, so they are not among the eight duel games. You can pass the phone around, but the app scores one player.
Are the dates exact?
Each card shows the date after you answer, with "c." where historians only know the approximate year.

All 13 games

Four events, one correct order. Drag the oldest to the top.

Download on theApp Store

Free on iPhone (iOS 26 or later). No account.