About Cairn

Cairn is a daily game about real places in the history of Great Britain. Every day one place is hidden on the map: a battlefield, an abbey, a castle, a shipwreck, a wartime code-breaking hut. Your job is to work out where it is.

How a quest works

Each quest is a moment, told from the ground: a year, a scene of a few lines, and one question about the people in it — where are they standing, where are they making for, where do they see it coming from. The story never names the place.

From that you work out where it happened and drop a pin on the map. Confirming your marker turns the page: everybody sees all three parts of the story, whatever they guessed. Then you get one last confirm, made knowing the whole of it — and wherever your marker is standing when you make it is your answer.

Solve it and the place is revealed, along with what actually happened there and where to read more about it.

Why it exists

Britain is unusually dense with history that is genuinely worth knowing, and that most of us learned once, at school, and then forgot. A few minutes a day, attached to a real place on a real map, turns out to be a much better way of keeping it.

The longer plan is walking: routes to and around the places you have found, so the game eventually gets you out to see the real thing.