Krillion Recorded answers
6,313 recorded answers
How to approach it
Reverse the usual move: instead of hunting for one item, generate a wide field of candidates quickly, then test each against the date. Choose a broad arena of old practical life — the household, the building site, the workshop, the battlefield, the sickroom — and jot down five or six concrete things from each, written with the precise term a specialist would use rather than the everyday word. Scrutiny comes next: does a written source place the thing before 1500, and is it an object, a technique or a system rather than a plant, a dish or a drink? Width first, judgement afterwards. Since the reveal rewards volume, keep extending the shortlist and note spelling variants of every entry, because a narrow technical label is often the form the list accepts.
Get a hint
Begin with the working capital of ordinary life in antiquity: the tools, containers, fastenings and structures people handled daily rather than the ceremonial pieces kept for the powerful.
A little more
Narrow next to problems that demanded a designed solution — keeping accounts, lifting water, marking the hour, landing a blow in combat, closing a wound — and ask whether a documented remedy predates 1500.
One step further
Finally, favour the specialist's label over the household word: a single implement, one named building element or a particular notation usually sits in reference works under a term nobody says aloud today.
Reveal answers 6,313
- Postal relayRare60points
- Potter's wheelRare60points
- PoundingRare60points
- Pregnancy testRare60points
- ProsthesisRare60points
- ProtractorRare60points
- Public toiletRare60points
- PunctuationRare60points
- PuppetRare60points
- QuarantineRare60points
- QuiltRare60points
- QuipuRare60points
- QuiverRare60points
- RackRare60points
- Rag dollRare60points
- RaincoatRare60points
- RakeRare60points
- RapierRare60points
- Rat trapRare60points
- RattleRare60points
- RazorRare60points
- RecorderRare60points
- Recurve bowRare60points
- ReinsRare60points
- Repeating crossbowRare60points
- ReservoirRare60points
- RivetRare60points
- RobeRare60points
- Rock paper scissorsRare60points
- RocketRare60points
- Rolling pinRare60points
- Roman numeralsRare60points
- Rope bridgeRare60points
- RosaryRare60points
- RougeRare60points
- RowboatRare60points
- RudderRare60points
- RunesRare60points
- SabreRare60points
- SaddleRare60points
- SafeRare60points
- SandalsRare60points
- SarcophagusRare60points
- SariRare60points
- SarongRare60points
- SatinRare60points
- SaucepanRare60points
- SaucerRare60points
- SaunaRare60points
- SawRare60points
Why these answers count
The scoring here is unusually flat: a single recorded pick took the full hundred, while more than five thousand earned eighty-five and seven hundred more stopped at sixty. That shape points to a closed list graded by rarity rather than by correctness — nearly everything submitted was accepted and then levelled. The lone maximum went to Pythagorean cup, an ingenious contrivance few players would reach for. The eighty-five band is vast and reads like a catalogue of specialist vocabulary: Ab anbar, Abat-son, Abatis, Abjad numerals, Acinaces, Acoustic jar, Acta Diurna. Each is a real thing from before 1500, yet each sits inside a niche — water supply, architecture, fortification, notation, armament — so finding one depends on knowing that corner of the field, not on luck. The sixty-point tier, seven hundred strong, probably collects the more familiar choices that many players hit at once. The practical lesson: obvious picks keep you in the middle of the pack, and the extra points come from the technical term.