About Imperial Souvenirs
A daily geography and history game.
How it works
Every day, five objects from the British Museum's collection appear. You guess where each one was made, and when. The map scores you on geographic proximity; the timeline scores you on how close your date is to the scholarly consensus. Maximum 10,000 points per round, 50,000 per game.
The British Museum holds roughly 8 million objects, acquired across three centuries during which Britain occupied, annexed, or extracted from a substantial fraction of the world’s land surface. The museum describes this as ‘universal heritage.’ This game describes it as something else. The commentary attached to each object targets the institution and its euphemisms which try to mask the fact that Britain brazenly plundered the globe to build its collection of imperial souvenirs we now know as the British Museum.
Provenance
After each round, the reveal panel includes a short editorial note on how the object arrived at the British Museum. Each note is sourced; links are provided. A coloured left border on the panel indicates, at a glance, the nature of the acquisition:
An active, documented repatriation claim exists from the country or community of origin.
The acquisition occurred under conditions of unequal imperial power — colonial rule, military occupation, or unequal-treaty regimes — even where no formal return claim has been filed.
A documented voluntary gift, purchase, or partage agreement. These exist.
These are editorial classifications based on documented historical evidence, not legal determinations. Reasonable historians disagree on borderline cases. The reasoning for each object is in the reveal panel.
Format credit
This format is shamelessly borrowed from Anthropeum — we just added three centuries of imperial guilt. Go play Anthropeum too.
Further reading
Legal & licensing
Non-affiliation
Imperial Souvenirs is not affiliated with, endorsed by, sponsored by, or connected to the British Museum or its Trustees in any way. “British Museum” is used as a factual reference to a public institution. All editorial commentary is the opinion of this site’s creators.
Object metadata
Object names, dates, dimensions, accession numbers, and provenance facts are factual data and are not protected by copyright. Data is sourced from Wikidata (CC0 / public domain), Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0), and the British Museum’s own public collection pages. Source URLs are attached to every object in the reveal panel.
Images
Object images, where displayed, are © The Trustees of the British Museum and licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (Attribution — Non-Commercial — Share Alike). This game is non-commercial and free to use. Individual image attribution is provided in each object’s source list. Wikimedia Commons images carry their own individual licences, listed per object.
Editorial commentary
The “voice” text accompanying each object is editorial commentary and satire protected as opinion and criticism. It targets institutional decisions and public policies, not private individuals. Historical claims are sourced; source URLs are listed with each object. Provenance classifications are editorial framing based on documented historical evidence, not legal determinations.
Privacy
No accounts. No tracking cookies. No analytics. Game state is stored in your browser’s localStorage and never leaves your device. Score distributions use bucketed aggregate counts — no individual scores are recorded or stored.
Site code
Source code is MIT licensed. Dependencies and their licences are listed in package.json.