Famous trials
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Order by the year each famous trial reached its verdict. Drag or tap it onto the line
Trials
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Trials
Famous trials
Order by the year each famous trial reached its verdict. You place all 35 cards on one timeline, one at a time. You start with three lives, and ten right in a row wins a lost one back.
35
Cards
3
Lives per run
release years and dates
Ordered by
Cards only
Card reveal
How to play the famous trials timeline game
Every card is a famous trial, from heresy hearings to celebrity courtrooms, and you put them in order by the year each reached its verdict. A short line under the name says what the case was about. The first card starts on the line, already dated. Judge where each new case belongs. Get it right and the year is entered beside it; get it wrong and the trial moves to its true spot while you forfeit one of three lives. Ten correct verdicts in a row win back a lost life.
The docket covers centuries, but it thins out early and grows crowded nearer the present, where sensational cases sit close together. Many of these were retold in films and series long afterward, which can make an old case feel fresh. The line under each name is your guide to the setting, so think about the politics and the place. Long-running cases are placed by their verdict, not by the crime.
Want a longer game? On the deck tree you can tick this deck alongside any other one measured in release years and dates, and they shuffle into a single timeline together.
What's in the deck
Here are 28 of the 35 cards you might be dealt, with 7 more in the deck. Their values stay hidden until you place them.
- Galileo before the Inquisition Condemned for backing heliocentrism
- Trial of Charles I A king tried by Parliament's court
- Salem witch trials Witchcraft hearings in Massachusetts
- John Peter Zenger Libel case and press freedom in New York
- Aaron Burr Former vice president tried for treason
- Lizzie Borden Axe murders in Fall River
- Alfred Dreyfus French army treason court-martial
- Oscar Wilde Gross indecency case in London
- Leopold and Loeb Clarence Darrow pleads against the death penalty
- Scopes Monkey Trial Teaching evolution in Dayton, Tennessee
- Scottsboro Boys Nine Black teenagers tried in Alabama
- Bruno Richard Hauptmann The Lindbergh baby kidnapping
- Julius and Ethel Rosenberg Atomic spying for the Soviets
- Adolf Eichmann Holocaust organizer tried in Jerusalem
- Rivonia Trial Nelson Mandela and ANC leaders
- Chicago Seven Protests at the Democratic convention
- Patty Hearst Kidnapped heiress turned bank robber
- Ted Bundy Chi Omega murders, tried in Miami
- John Hinckley Jr. Shot President Reagan, ruled insane
- Rodney King beating officers Acquittal sparked the Los Angeles riots
- Menendez brothers Killed their parents in Beverly Hills
- Timothy McVeigh Oklahoma City bombing
- Michael Jackson Acquitted in Santa Maria, California
- Saddam Hussein Dujail killings, tried in Baghdad
- Elizabeth Holmes Theranos fraud
- Johnny Depp v. Amber Heard Defamation case in Virginia
- Sam Bankman-Fried FTX fraud
- Donald Trump hush money trial Felony case in Manhattan
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