Tap 10: Inventions Challenges Players to Put Their Knowledge in Order

Everything around us was pretty much at one point invented at some point. Be it the machine you’re reading this article on, to the transport you take to work, and even the chair you sit on. Recognising an invention is one thing, but knowing where it belongs in history is another. Tap 10: Inventions, currently funding on Kickstarter from Swedish publisher Nordic Pirates, builds a card game around that gap between familiarity and knowledge, challenging players to put inventions in chronological order before their opponents do.

Designed by Mikaela Hård and Lucas Vagner, with illustrations by Ester Torredelforth, the game covers a 150 year period between 1875–2025. Tap 10: Inventions is for 2–8 players, ages 8+, amd has a playing time of around 15–30 minutes.

Ten Cards to Victory

In the standard game, each player starts with one invention card showing its year. This establishes their personal timeline and counts as the first of the ten cards needed to win.

On your turn, you choose one of two visible invention cards offered by the tuck boxes. You can see the invention’s name and illustration, but its date remains hidden. Decide where it belongs in your timeline, tap the position, and place the card there before revealing the answer.

A correct placement stays in your timeline whilst a mistake normally sends the card to the discard pile. Matching years are allowed, so inventions dated to the same year can sit beside one another without causing a problem.

Each card increases the difficultly and challenge. Placing a card before or after your first invention offers a broad target, but as your personal timeline begins to fill and become mrope crowded fitting future cards correctly demands more of a precise judgement. You do not need to name the exact year to make a successful placement, but the gaps between your existing cards can leave little room for uncertainty.

Eureka! Your Mistake, My Point

Other players have a reason to pay attention while you make that decision.

Everyone begins with two Eureka tokens. Before a card’s year is revealed, an opponent can call “Eureka!” and place a token in a different gap in the active player’s timeline. Several players can challenge the same placement, provided they choose different gaps.

If the active player is right, they keep the card and the challengers lose their spent tokens. If the placement is wrong and a challenger has identified the correct gap, that challenger claims the card and adds it correctly to their own timeline. Spent challenge tokens are discarded either way, subject to the rulebook’s exception for equally valid placements beside matching years.

Players can replenish tokens through bonus knowledge, such as identifying the relevant inventor or company, or naming the printed year within two years. A player can hold up to five tokens.

Prefer Your History in a Hurry?

Blitz mode replaces alternating turns with simultaneous play. Each player receives ten cards with their dates hidden and races to arrange them. When someone believes their sequence is correct, they shout “Tap 10!” and everyone stops.

Timelines are then checked from oldest to newest. A player keeps the correctly ordered cards before their first error, but loses the mistaken card and everything to its right. Replacement cards bring players back to ten for another round. Eureka tokens introduce another complication as, during the challenge phase, players can spend them to steal an unrevealed card from another timeline.

The rulebook also includes an optional push-your-luck variant for Classic play. After a correct placement, you can lock in your gains or attempt another card. Get a placement wrong and the cards accumulated during that turn are lost. It offers a further way to turn your historical confidence into a gamble to get an advantage over your opponents, or to try and catch up if you’ve slipped bejind.

What Counts as an Invention’s Year?

The rules makes a useful distinction about its dates. Cards use the year an invention first entered real use, rather than necessarily the year it was patented, sketched or demonstrated. It also acknowledges that some historical details are simplified or open to debate and points readers towards an online source list. The cards also carry trivia, inventor information and a country, giving the reveal something beyond a simple right-or-wrong answer.

This Sounds A Bit Familar…

Players familiar with Timeline, published by Asmodee’s Zygomatic label, will recognise the central idea of placing a card into chronological order with its date hidden, then revealing it to check your answer. The main structural difference between the two games is that Timeline has everyone contributing to one shared timeline while attempting to clear their own cards. Tap 10 instead gives each player a personal timeline and a target of ten correctly placed inventions, meaning your own successes gradually narrow the gaps you must navigate.

Tap 10’s also has other differences from Timeline, with the clearest being its Eureka token system, which lets opponents challenge a placement and claim the card if they identify where it actually belongs. This introduces a limited resource and a direct incentive to follow other players’ turns. Its simultaneous Blitz mode and optional push-your-luck variant provide further departures from standard format seen in Timeline. The underlying chronological puzzle is therefore familiar, but the challenges, personal timelines and alternative modes give players several different ways to approach it making it very much its own game. Certainly fans of Timeline will probably find this a fun alternative with it’s various game modes, personal timelines, and also a lot of inventions which won’t have been seen in the other game.

I, personally, have been a big fan of Timeline since it was first published back in 2012 but have also backed Tap 10 as I know it’ll appeal to not only myself but a number of different groups I game with.

Currently on Kickstarter

The box contains 250 invention cards, 30 Eureka tokens, three tuck boxes and a rulebook. The official website also offers a browser demo which, I can say from personal experience, is harder to beat than you may think.

The first 200 backers of the Kickstarter can also get an early bird pledge which gives you a free 20-card expansion pack, which features 20 iconic products in gaming history, which can be mixed into the main deck. The pack is also available to buy in other pledges,

TheTAP 10 - Inventions Kickstarter campaign runs until Friday 20th November 2026.