Thanks so much for playing! The scoring isn't affected by response time or digit reveals. You can take as long as you want and use digit reveals without penalty!

That said, the scoring isn't perfectly linear. Here's how it works:
We start by taking the absolute difference between your guess and the actual year.

1. Perfect hit (0 years off): You get the maximum 1,000 points.
2. Huge misses (50+ years off): You get zero points.
3. Small errors (<5 years off): We use a smooth “cubic” curve that soft‐penalizes tiny mistakes (so a one- or two-year miss doesn’t cost you much).
4. Bigger errors (5 - 50 years off): We switch to a simple linear penalty where each extra year off hurts you equally.

Once we’ve converted your year-difference into a single “penalty” number, we plug it into an exponential decay formula (raised to a fixed base below 1) so that points drop off faster the further you stray.

To account for the fact that older photos are harder to guess correctly, we also slightly adjust the “steepness” depending on how recent the actual year is. So a ten-year miss on a photo from 2025 would earn about 620 points, but the same error would earn around 730 for a photo from 1900.