Fall BackWhy this exists
Twice a year, millions of people stand in front of an oven, pressing buttons at random, while their phone sits smugly on the counter having already done its own clock. Fall Back turns that ritual into a game.
The game
Eight gadgets, each a little state machine modelled on the real thing: a microwave with a keypad, an oven with press-and-hold − and +, a car dashboard whose H and M buttons only go forwards, a four-button digital watch with a setting maze (and an alarm screen that sets the wrong thing), a battery wall clock you wind by hand, a clock radio with a three-way switch and a PM dot, a VCR with an on-screen menu that can end up in German or French, and a mechanical central-heating timer that only turns clockwise.
Your phone in the top bar is the one true time, and it keeps ticking. So do the gadgets, except while you are setting them, just like the real ones. A gadget counts as done when it matches your phone to within a minute (eight minutes for the boiler dial, whose pins are 15 minutes apart).
Scoring. Your time, plus 5 seconds for each manual you open. “Par” is the fewest presses a careful person needs. Efficiency is par divided by your presses. Your rank depends on time. Your nemesis is the gadget you spent longest on. Results go into the link you share, so friends see your exact report.
Modes. Fall Back (every clock an hour fast), Spring Forward (an hour slow), Power Cut (mains clocks blinking from scratch, the boiler stopped at 3:12 AM) and an untimed Practice mode. The true time is randomised every round.
The Daylight Lab and the Atlas
Clock rules come from your own browser’s IANA time-zone database through the standard Intl API, so nothing about who changes when is typed in by hand. Sunrise and sunset come from the standard sunrise equation (solar declination plus the equation of time, with the usual −0.833° allowance for refraction and the sun’s disc). That is accurate to about a minute at ordinary latitudes and gets rougher near the poles.
“Permanent summer time” means the zone’s standard offset plus its usual summer shift, all year. For places that never change, the lab shows what one hour ahead all year would look like.
Sources
- Wikipedia — Daylight saving time (Franklin, Hudson, Willett, Port Arthur 1908, Germany 1916, US 1918, 1966, 2007, Russia 2011–14)
- Wikipedia — British Summer Time (Summer Time Act 1916, Double Summer Time, the 1968–71 experiment and the 366–81 vote, 1995 alignment)
- European Commission — Summertime consultation: 84% want Europe to stop changing the clock (4.6 million responses)
- Washingtonian — The US tried permanent daylight saving time in the ’70s. People hated it.
- FOX 5 DC — Daylight saving time 2026: will our clocks still fall back? (Sunshine Protection Act, House vote 14 July 2026)
- Wikipedia — Sunshine Protection Act
- AP via KTVU — Mexico scraps daylight saving time except along US border (59–25 Senate vote)
- The Scotsman — exact time the clocks go back in 2026
- timeanddate.com — DST season, fall 2026
Credits & small print
Everything here (gadgets, art, text and code) is original and was built for one day: Saturday 24 October 2026, the eve of the clock change in the UK and Europe. Fonts: Bricolage Grotesque, DM Sans and JetBrains Mono from Google Fonts. No trackers and no accounts. Best times, quiz scores and verdicts stay in your browser’s local storage.
The brands are made up: the watch is “Timex-ish”, and any resemblance to your own oven’s user interface is, sadly, entirely intentional.
This is a game and an explainer, not health advice. Where the page mentions the sleep-science debate, it reports who argues what.