Timeline alternative: the chronological sorting game on mobile

Published on 8 August 2026

Timeline is the game that popularised chronological sorting: a card, an event, and you have to place it correctly on the shared timeline. Rules learned in thirty seconds, a perfect family format. The problem shows up around the fifth game, when everyone knows the cards by heart.

Timeline vs Junban: the comparison

What Timeline does really well

Let's not be sniffy: Timeline is a genuine success. It fits in a pocket, needs neither battery nor connection, and the physical object creates a conviviality no screen fully replaces. It also makes an excellent gift, and a very good teaching aid for kids.

Where Junban takes over

Timeline's limit is structural: a box holds a finite number of cards, and memory does the rest. Junban starts from the same principle — place an item before or after the previous one — but with over 5,000 items across more than 50 themes and playlists: movies, music, TV shows, history, sport, inventions, plus sagas like Harry Potter, Star Wars and Stranger Things.

Three differences change everyday use:

• Renewal. New themes arrive regularly, with no expansion to buy.
• Solo mode. Timeline needs other players; Junban offers a ranked solo mode you can play on your commute.
• Music mode. A clip starts blind and gets sorted like a card: impossible on cardboard.

And for game nights, multiplayer goes up to 4 players: everyone from home remotely, or all around a table on the same phone.

Do you have to choose?

Not necessarily. Many players keep Timeline for screen-free family meals and use Junban the rest of the time — on the train, solo, or once the box's cards have been memorised.

If what you want is to get the Timeline feeling without the card limit, the app does the job.

👉 Try Junban on iOS and Android.

Also worth reading: our pick of the 8 best timeline quiz games and the Hitster alternative.