TRH — Today in Rock History

How It Works

Every rule, point value, and streak mechanic on this site — the full reference, not the short version.

The Basics

  • Log in with Discord to play — it's just identity, we never see your email or message anything on your behalf. You don't need to be in any particular server to play here.
  • Playing on the website and playing in Discord share one score. Same points, same streaks, same leaderboard, no matter where you play.
  • Points reset to zero every Monday at midnight Central. Streaks and accuracy stats are not affected by the reset — only your weekly point total.
  • Whoever's on top when the reset hits gets crowned that week's champion. You need at least 40 points to show up on the leaderboard at all.

Point Games

These count toward your weekly score and your streaks.

⚡ Daily Challenge

Choose Ranked Mode or Easy Mode before you're shown a question. Ranked Mode is the real one described below — points and streak on the line. Easy Mode pulls an easier practice question instead: no points are ever awarded, but it keeps its own separate streak. Playing one never uses up your attempt in the other, so you can do both every day if you want.

One shared question per mode, live from noon to midnight Central every day — everyone gets the same one. You get exactly one attempt per mode, and that attempt is used up the moment the question is revealed to you, not when you answer, so backing out after seeing it still costs you the day for that mode.

  • Answer window: 15 seconds (with a small grace buffer for lag).
  • Ranked Mode points: Easy 10 · Medium 20 · Hard 30.
  • Easy Mode points: none, ever — it's practice only.
  • Streaks: Ranked Mode and Easy Mode each keep their own, completely separate streak. Either one climbs on a correct day and resets to zero on a wrong answer, a timeout, or a missed day. Ranked Mode's streak fires the milestone celebrations at 7, 30, 50, 100, 200, and 300 days, with a special celebration at 365; Easy Mode's streak doesn't trigger those.

Double Down (Ranked Mode, website only)

Before the question is revealed, you can choose to double down. Get it right and you earn double that difficulty's points. Get it wrong, or time out, and it costs you double those points instead — taken out of your current weekly total, which can't go below zero. Since it only floors at zero for the week, a bad Double Down can still cost you real ground before the next reset. Easy Mode never offers Double Down, since it never has points to wager in the first place.

🎸 Trivia Main (Practice Mode)

Choose Ranked Mode or Easy Mode before you start. Ranked Mode is unlimited questions, no streak riding on it — your first 10 answers of the day are point-eligible; after that you're playing for fun. Every answer, right or wrong, uses up one of those 10 slots, so there's no advantage to skipping a hard one hoping for an easier question next. Easy Mode is even simpler: unlimited, easier-difficulty questions, no points ever, no daily cap at all — pure practice.

  • Ranked Mode points: same scale as Daily Challenge — Easy 10 · Medium 20 · Hard 30 — awarded only while a point-eligible slot remains.
  • Easy Mode points: none, ever — and it never touches Ranked Mode's 10-question daily cap.
  • Completion bonus (Ranked Mode only): use all 10 of your point-eligible slots on the website in a single day and you get a flat +30 bonus on top. Splitting those 10 between Discord and the website doesn't qualify — it has to be all 10 on the site to trigger it.
💿 Cover Story

A name-free clue and four album covers. Pick the right one in 15 seconds. One puzzle a day, same for everyone.

  • Points: 30 flat for a correct answer.
  • Streak: same rules as Daily Challenge — keeps building on a correct day, resets on a miss.
🎭 Daily Rock Culture

One true-or-false statement about rock history. 15 seconds to answer, one a day.

  • Points: 15 flat for a correct answer — lower than Cover Story on purpose, since a coin-flip guess has better odds than picking 1 of 4 covers.
  • Streak: same rules as Daily Challenge and Cover Story.
🧵 Strings

A daily word grid. Drag through letters to spell words — they can zigzag, not just straight lines. One special word (the spangram) stretches all the way across the board and reveals that day's theme once you find it.

  • Base points: 15 for completing the puzzle.
  • Clean Sweep bonus: +5 for finishing without using a single hint.
  • Purist bonus: +10 for finishing having found zero bonus words at all (words that aren't part of the puzzle's theme). This one's worth more on purpose — since hints can only be paid for with bonus-word currency, finding zero bonus words automatically means zero hints too, making it the strictly harder achievement.
  • Perfect run: 15 + 5 + 10 = 30 points, matching Cover Story's max.
  • Hints: every bonus word you find banks 1 point toward a hint; a hint costs 3. First use on a word outlines it; a second use on that same word starts a letter-by-letter pulse. You're locked to that one hinted word until you find it.
  • Three separate streaks: just completing it, doing it hint-free, and doing it bonus-word-free — the last two reset the moment you use a hint or find a bonus word on a day you still solve it.

Just for Fun

No points, no streaks, no daily limit — play these as much as you want.

🎵 Power Chord

A memory-matching game — flip tiles to find pairs. Modes rotate between artist↔album, artist↔song, and musician↔band.

  • Difficulty: Easy (5 pairs) · Medium (10 pairs) · Hard (15 pairs) — all three give you 10 mistakes before the round ends.
  • On a loss: the board reveals what you were missing — tiles you'd already found stay green, everything else you never got shows up yellow so you can see what the answers were.
📅 Timeline

Four rock-history events, no years shown. Put them in order, earliest to latest, and submit — it's all or nothing, no partial credit. The four events are always pulled from four different years, so there's never an unfair tie you couldn't actually know the answer to.

🔥 Blackout

A 4×4 board where each of the 16 squares is a category or era. Tap one, answer the question that comes up within 15 seconds — get it right and the square clears, get it wrong (or run out of time) and it locks gray for the rest of the board.

Celebration tiers

Clearing certain patterns triggers its own little celebration: any full row, column, or diagonal · the middle four squares · all four corners · the whole outside ring · everything except the corners · and clearing the entire board, which gets its own bigger stinger sound reserved just for that.

⏱️ Speed Round

60 seconds on the clock, unlimited questions back to back — answer as many as you can before time runs out. Nothing to win here except your own best score.

  • Tracked: your personal best single-round score, total rounds played, and your all-time accuracy across every round you've ever run.