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 small story. Someone has lost something they need — a standard, a gauntlet, a rotor wheel — and the story never says where they lost it. From that, and from the two further hints if you want them, you work out the place and drop a pin on the map. The game tells you how close you are and roughly which way to go, and you try again.

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.