Path Recall

A route is drawn across a four-by-four grid, its cells numbered in order. You look at it, hide it, and walk it back one cell at a time from memory. Clear a route and the next one is a step longer, from three steps up to ten. One wrong cell ends the run.

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. Read the route. The cells on it are numbered 1, 2, 3… in the order you must walk them, and the two ends are labelled start and end.
3. Hide it with Enter, or by tapping the board. The numbers go and the grid is blank again.
4. Walk it back. Arrow keys move the outlined cursor, Enter places the next step. Or click the cells directly. Each cell you get right prints its own number, so you can always see how far along you are.
5. Peek with H if you lose the thread. The route comes back for a shorter look, twice per game, and each peek costs points.
6. Keep going. Each round adds one step. Eight routes, three to ten steps, and one mistake ends it.

How do you remember a path on a grid?

Not as a list of squares — as a handful of runs. "Right, right, down, left" is four moves but only three things to hold, and by the time a route is eight steps long the difference between holding eight positions and holding three runs is the difference between clearing it and not. That is why the route here is always a connected walk between touching cells rather than a scatter of separate blocks: a scatter cannot be chunked, so it can only be drilled. Start from an end you can name ("bottom-left corner"), read the shape as directions, and rehearse the directions rather than the squares.

Is the route timed?

There is no clock anywhere in this game. The reveal is counted in moves, not seconds — the board only advances when you do something — so reading slowly costs you nothing, and the same session plays identically on a five-year-old phone and a new laptop. Nothing disappears until you hide it.

Why is the route a connected walk rather than scattered cells?

Because a connected walk can be chunked and a scatter cannot, and chunking is the whole skill worth practising. It also buys fairness: the route never crosses itself and never uses a cell twice, so at every single moment exactly one cell is the right answer, and it is never one you have already placed. Boards that let a route revisit a cell leave you asking "was this the second visit or the fourth?" — a question about the puzzle rather than about your memory.

Why does one wrong cell end the run?

Because a route you can probe cell by cell would measure patience rather than recall, and the number of steps it reported would not mean anything. Ending on the first mistake is what makes "I reached seven" a fact about you.

What is the peek for?

Honesty about how memory actually fails. You rarely lose a whole route; you lose the middle of it. A peek gives you a second, shorter look with your progress intact — twice per game, at sixty points each — so a half-remembered route is a decision rather than a dead end.

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, and nothing to win or lose but the number of steps you reached.

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

Both, fully. Every cell is a button with a spoken label, and the route is announced the way you should be encoding it — "start at column 2 row 1, then right, right, down" — rather than as a list of coordinates. Nothing is signalled by colour alone: a route cell prints its step number, the cell that ended the run prints a cross, and an unused cell prints a dot.

Four by four, eight rounds, routes of three to ten steps, two peeks. Ten steps is the ceiling on a board this small on purpose — beyond it a self-avoiding route starts to be forced by the edges rather than remembered, so the game would be measuring the board instead of you. Every route is generated from the day's seed, so the daily board is the same board for everyone, and a route is built by walking it rather than by drawing cells at random, which is why one can never be impossible.

Number Span is the same ladder with digits instead of cells, if you would rather test verbal recall than spatial. Pair Flip is the other memory game on a grid, and rewards remembering what you saw rather than the order you saw it in.

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