Old Borders is a route puzzle: get from one country to another overland, using Europe's borders as they stood in a given year.
Each round picks one of five years and two countries. You name the countries you would cross, and every guess is coloured by how close it is to a shortest route: green if it is on one, yellow if it is one country off, orange if two, red if further. You win as soon as your guesses join the two countries. Islands and sea crossings do not count, only land borders.
The fun is that the same trip changes completely between years. Greece to Germany crosses the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary in 1910, but Yugoslavia and Austria in 1925.
Germany is not yet one country. Prussia leads the North German Confederation, founded in 1867, while the kingdoms of Bavaria and Württemberg and the grand duchies of Baden and Hesse stay outside it until 1871. France under Napoleon III still holds Alsace and Lorraine, so it borders Bavaria and Baden directly.
Italy has been unified since 1861 but the Pope still rules Rome and Lazio as the Papal States, surrounded on land by the Kingdom of Italy, until 1870. In the Balkans, Bulgaria and Bosnia are Ottoman provinces; Serbia and Romania are self-governing principalities under Ottoman suzerainty, and the Ottoman Sanjak of Novi Pazar keeps Serbia and Montenegro apart. Sweden and Norway share one king, and Finland is a grand duchy of the Russian Empire.
The 1890 map is the only one that leaves Europe. It runs from Portugal to Japan, so a route can cross the whole continent: from the German Empire through the Russian Empire into Qing China, or from the Ottoman Empire through Qajar Persia and Afghanistan into British India. Africa is left out, and island states such as Japan, Ceylon and the Philippines cannot be reached overland.
In Europe, Germany and Italy are unified, Bulgaria is still a principality (it absorbed Eastern Rumelia in 1885) and Bosnia is run by Austria-Hungary, though formally Ottoman until 1908. Sweden and Norway still share a king. In Asia, the Qing Empire includes Mongolia, Tibet, Xinjiang and Taiwan, Korea is the Kingdom of Joseon, and the Russian Empire holds the Central Asian khanates of Bukhara and Khiva as protectorates. Siam still rules Laos, which it lost to France in 1893, and France had joined Cochinchina, Annam, Tonkin and Cambodia into French Indochina in 1887. Upper Burma became part of British India in 1886.
Four great empires dominate the continent: the German Empire, Austria-Hungary, the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. Poland does not exist; its lands are divided between the first three. Austria-Hungary annexed Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1908, and Norway left its union with Sweden in 1905.
Albania does not exist yet either. Before the Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 the Ottoman Empire still holds Macedonia, Thrace and the Sanjak of Novi Pazar, so it borders Greece, Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria and Austria-Hungary.
The First World War and the peace treaties redraw the map. New states line the old imperial frontiers: Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Hungary, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, renamed Yugoslavia in 1929, joins the South Slav lands.
East Prussia is cut off from the rest of Germany by the Polish Corridor and the Free City of Danzig. Lithuania has taken the Memel territory, so it borders Germany. Finland reaches the Arctic at Petsamo, so Norway and the Soviet Union do not share a border. The Ottoman Empire has given way to the Republic of Turkey, and Ireland has become the Irish Free State.
Germany is split into the Federal Republic in the west and the Democratic Republic in the east, both founded in 1949. Austria is under four-power occupation until 1955. The Soviet Union has moved west: it now borders Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Norway, after absorbing the Baltic states, eastern Poland, Ruthenia and Petsamo.
The borders come from the open historical-basemaps dataset by A. Ourednik and are simplified for the game. Where the dataset does not have the exact year, the map is adjusted by hand: the 1868 map rolls the 1880 borders back, using the German states' 1815 outlines and redrawn pre-1878 Balkan frontiers; the 1910 map combines the 1900 and 1914 data; 1925 uses the 1930 borders; 1950 uses the 1960 borders. Small details such as the Saar Protectorate or the Free Territory of Trieste are not shown separately.
Old Borders · Map borders based on historical-basemaps by A. Ourednik (GPL-3.0), simplified and adjusted by hand.