Echo Tiles

Every tile hides a five-beat rhythm drawn as pips — ● where a pulse falls, ○ where it does not. Turn two tiles over and they are a pair only if their pulses land on exactly the same beats. Every rhythm in the deal carries exactly three pulses, so you can never tell two tiles apart by how busy they look: the only thing that separates them is where the pulses sit. Find all six pairs before the mismatches run out.

It runs entirely on your device: 0 network requests, works offline. No ads, no account, nothing to buy, and no betting, money or prizes of any kind.

1. Focus the board — click it, or press Tab until it is focused.
2. Move the outlined cursor with the arrow keys. It clamps at the edges rather than wrapping, so the board keeps its shape while you build a map of it.
3. Turn a tile with Enter, or click it. Its rhythm appears as a row of pips.
4. Turn a second tile. If the two rhythms are identical the pair stays face up and is marked ✓ echo. If not, both stay on screen with △ 1 off or ✕ 2 off — one pulse moved, or two — and one mismatch is spent.
5. Take as long as you like. There is no timer, and the mismatched pair stays visible until your next turn, so nothing vanishes while you are still reading it.
6. Only mismatches cost. Turning a tile you already remember is free, so re-checking a rhythm you are half-sure about is never punished.
7. Clear all six pairs before the mismatch budget runs out. The budget is shown at the top, next to how the deal came out — close, ordinary or scattered.

How do you remember a rhythm pattern?

By its shape, not by its beats. Nobody holds "pulse, rest, pulse, pulse, rest" as five separate facts — they hold it as "one, gap, two together", which is two chunks instead of five items, and two chunks is comfortably inside anyone's working memory. That is the same trick that turns a ten-digit phone number into three groups, and it is why musicians read a bar as a handful of figures rather than as a list of notes. On this board it means looking at a tile and naming its grouping out loud before you move on. A player who does that beats a player who stares harder, every time.

Why does every rhythm have the same number of pulses?

Because otherwise the game would be about counting, not remembering. If one tile had four pulses and another had two you could separate them at a glance and never encode either one. With every rhythm fixed at three pulses in five beats there are exactly ten possible rhythms, any two of them differ only in where the pulses sit, and the memory you need is positional — which is the kind worth practising and the kind a pairs game with pictures on the tiles never asks for.

What do "1 off" and "2 off" mean?

How far apart the two rhythms you just turned actually were. Since every rhythm has three pulses, one can only become another by moving pulses: 1 off means a single pulse would have to shift, 2 off means two would. It is information, not decoration — a tile that is one off from a rhythm you have already paired cannot be that rhythm, and a run of "2 off" verdicts tells you the tile you keep turning is nothing like the half of the board you have already seen. Treat every mismatch as evidence and the last two pairs usually fall out by elimination.

Where does the mismatch budget come from?

From a solver, not from a guess. Before the board is drawn, a reference player with perfect recall walks the exact deal you are about to see: it never turns a tile twice, and it pairs anything it already knows the moment it can. The mismatches it pays are the cost of the arrangement itself — a deal whose partners happen to sit near each other costs it almost nothing, a scattered one costs it several turns — and your budget is that number plus a fixed margin for being human. That is why a scattered deal hands you more room than a kind one, and why the number changes from game to game.

Can a deal ever be impossible?

No, and not by luck — by construction. The deck is built by choosing six distinct rhythms, writing each of them into the deck exactly twice, and then shuffling. Shuffling rearranges a deck but cannot change what is in it, so after the shuffle every tile still has exactly one partner somewhere on the board. There is no check-and-retry step that could produce a bad board on an unlucky day, because there is no way for a bad board to be built in the first place.

Is there any money, betting or in-app purchase in this?

None, and there never will be. No currency, no purchases, no lives to refill, nothing to buy and nothing to win but the pairs on the board. The score at the end is worked out from the mismatches you had left over, and it stays on your device.

Can I play it with a keyboard or a screen reader?

Both, fully. Every tile is a button with a spoken label, and a rhythm is read out as the beats it falls on — "beats 1, 3 and 4" — so it can be held and compared without ever being seen. Every state carries a glyph as well as a tint: ✓ for a pair, △ for one pulse out, ✕ for two, ? for a tile still face down. Nothing on this board is signalled by colour alone, and it plays identically in greyscale.

Twelve tiles, six pairs, five beats and three pulses each. Three pulses in five beats gives ten possible rhythms and the deal uses six of them, so four rhythms are absent from any given board — which is why "what have I not seen yet?" is never a complete answer on its own. The mismatch budget runs from eight to eleven depending on the deal. There is no timer anywhere, no sound is required, and the whole game is generated from the day's seed, so the daily board is the same board for everyone playing it.

Pair Flip is the same turn-two-and-compare shape with distinct symbols on the tiles, if you would rather practise recognising objects than positions. Sequence Echo asks you to hold a pattern in order rather than in place, and Number Span does the same job with digits.

Bookmark this page (Ctrl+D, or ⌘D on Mac) or install the app — it works offline the next time you need it.