Trace the hands of history
Historic
Ink
Everyone here is dead. It's a game about steady hands and the strange beauty of other people's handwriting.
Scoring works the way a document examiner does. The big tell is line quality. People sign their own name fast, without thinking about it, so the line comes out smooth and unbroken. Someone copying a signature goes slowly and watches what they're doing, and the line shakes. Where it sits on the page barely counts — landing exactly on top of the original is evidence of tracing, not of a real hand — so a steady line slightly off the mark beats a shaky one dead on it.
The signatures come from Wikimedia Commons. We asked Wikidata which historical figures have one on file, then measured how hard each is to copy: how much pen travel is packed into the space, how much it turns, how tangled it gets, and how fine the pen was. A broad nib forgives a wobble. A hairline doesn't.
You play sideways, and every signature here is a wide one. Those two go together. Scaled to the same length, a wide signature fills the card while a squarer one has to shrink to fit — so it turns up smaller and gets harder to trace for reasons that have nothing to do with the handwriting. Keeping only the wide ones means they all reach you at the same size, and difficulty means what it says.
Progress is stored on this device only.