Quick Count

Four kinds of shape flash onto a grid — triangles, squares, circles, diamonds — and you are asked how many there were of just one of them. One, two, three, four: you will not feel yourself counting at all, the number is simply there. Five, six, seven: something changes, and you will feel exactly where. The round ends by telling you how often you were right below that line and how often above it, in your own numbers.

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 what you are counting. Before each flash the game names one kind, for example "count the triangles", and shows its shape. That is the only kind that matters; the rest are there to be ignored.
3. Look. The shapes appear for a moment, then vanish. The bar underneath is how long you get, and it is worked out from the board itself — more to count, or more to look past, means more time.
4. Answer with the arrow keys. Four candidate counts appear, one on each of ↑, →, ↓ and ←. Press the direction of your answer. The four on-screen buttons do the same thing for touch.
5. Watch your lives. A wrong answer costs one; so does letting the answer bar empty. Three lives, twelve rounds.
6. Read the result. It splits your accuracy into counts of four or fewer and counts of five or more, and gives your average answering time for each.

Why can you see four things at a glance but have to count five?

Because up to about four, you are not counting at all. Psychologists call the fast process subitising — the number arrives whole, in roughly the same time whether it is one item or four, with almost no errors. Past four the process changes character completely: time per item jumps to something like a fifth of a second each, accuracy starts to slip, and you become aware of doing work. The usual explanation is that a small set can be individuated in parallel by the visual system — each item gets its own index, and there are only about four indexes to go round — while a larger set has to be enumerated one at a time, or chunked and added. The boundary is not sharp and it moves with practice, arrangement and clutter, which is exactly why it is worth measuring on yourself rather than reading about. This game measures it by scoring the two sides separately: same shapes, same rules, and a visible gap that appears the moment the count crosses four.

Why are there other shapes on the board?

Because a plain count of identical dots only shows the limit between boards — you would learn nothing from any single one. Making you count one kind among others means every board has a search in it as well as a count, so three triangles hidden among six other shapes still has to be found before it can be seen. That is what makes the difference between seeing and counting noticeable inside a single round.

How long do I get to look, and is it the same every time?

No, and that is deliberate. The look window is computed from the board in front of you: a floor to register that anything appeared at all, plus a fixed allowance for every item past the fourth and a smaller one for every shape you have to look past. On top of that sits a slack margin, and that margin — and only that margin — shrinks with every correct answer. The work the board demands is never taken away from you, so the game can get hard without ever becoming unfair.

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

None, and there never will be. There is no currency, nothing to buy, no lives to refill for a fee, and no wager of any kind. Twelve rounds and three lives is the whole economy.

Is this a real test of anything?

It is the same task laboratories use, but it is a game, not an assessment. A real measurement uses hundreds of trials, controlled viewing distance and lighting, and no scoring pressure at all. Treat the split as something interesting about your afternoon, not as a result about you.

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

Both. The arrow keys are the primary control — there is nothing here a mouse can do that a keyboard cannot. For a screen reader the board is spoken as a short list of shapes in reading order rather than flashed, because a half-second exposure is not something a screen reader can render; you count what you hear, which is the same task in a different sense. The countdown is a labelled progress bar, and nothing anywhere in the game is distinguished by colour alone.

Does it work offline?

Yes. Once the page has loaded once, the whole game is on your device — every board is generated locally from a seed, so there is no server involved in play at any point.

Can the answer ever not be one of the four choices?

No, and that is guaranteed by how a board is made rather than checked afterwards. The game picks the answer first, then builds a board that holds exactly that many of the target shape, then offers four consecutive counts positioned so that the true one is always among them. Working backwards from the answer means a board and its score cannot disagree.

Twelve rounds, three lives, counts from one to nine, and two to five shapes of other kinds on every board. The four candidates are always consecutive, so estimating will not save you — near the limit you have to be exactly right. The answering window is a generous two and a half seconds on purpose: the pressure in this game belongs on the looking, not on the pressing. And the split at four is a convention, not a hard edge in your head — some people hold up to five, some fall over at three, and arrangement matters more than most people expect.

Number Span asks the neighbouring question about memory rather than perception: not how many you can see at once, but how many you can hold. Side Step is the other game here that measures something about you and then shows you the measurement.

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