Recall Grid

Some cells on a five-by-five grid light up. You look at them, hide them, and mark the ones you remember — in any order you like. Get them all and the next set is one cell bigger, from three up to nine. The number you walk away with is your span: the most cells you could hold at once. Most people land between four and seven, and the game tells you where you landed rather than whether you won.

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 lit cells. Each one shows a filled disc and the word lit. The status row tells you how many there are and — the part worth reading — how many separate groups they form.
3. Hide them with Enter, or by tapping the board. The grid goes blank. Nothing disappears until you do this, so take as long as you want.
4. Mark what you remember. Arrow keys move the outlined cursor, Enter marks or unmarks the cell under it, and a mark shows a diamond. Or click the cells directly. Order does not matter.
5. Start the round over with Esc, which clears every mark you have placed.
6. The round ends on your last mark — the moment you have marked as many cells as were lit. The answer comes straight up: a tick for a cell you got right, a cross for one you marked that was dark, a hollow ring for one that was lit and you missed. Press anything to move on.
7. Keep going. Every set you get right adds a cell. Get one wrong and the same size comes back with a fresh set; the third wrong round ends the run and reports your span.

How many things can you remember at once?

Between four and seven, for most people, and the interesting part is what counts as a "thing". Your visual short-term memory does not store cells, it stores groups — two cells touching are one thing to hold, not two. That is why this game prints the group count while the board is up. Someone clearing nine cells arranged as three little clusters is holding three things, not nine, and knowing that is worth more than the number itself: the way to move your span is not to strain harder at individual squares, it is to notice the shapes they make and rehearse those instead. Read a board as "pair top-left, single in the middle, triple down the right" and nine cells become three.

Why does the board tell me how many groups the cells form?

Because it is the only honest way to report a span. A set of eight cells sitting in one solid block is one shape — you could clear it while holding a single thing — so a game that let that count as "span eight" would be flattering you. Every set here is checked before it is used: the generator flood-fills the cells it drew, counts the separate groups, and throws the draw away if there are too few for its size. That check is also what sets how long the board stays up, because a set scattered into five groups genuinely is more to take in than five cells in a row.

Is it 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. The lit cells stay up until you hide them yourself.

Does the order I mark the cells in matter?

No, and that is deliberate. Marking a set in order tests two different memories at once — which cells, and in what sequence — so one transposition throws away a board you actually remembered, and the span it reports comes out lower than the number you were really holding. Here the set is the whole answer. It also means you can start with whichever cell you are surest of and work outward, which is what people naturally do anyway.

What happens when I get one wrong?

The same size comes back with a completely new set of cells, and you have two of those second chances before the run ends. The set is new on purpose: re-showing the board you just missed would test the last ten seconds rather than your span, and you would clear it for the wrong reason.

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 win and nothing to lose but the size of the set 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 while the board is up the lit cells are read out by column and row — "three cells in two groups: column 1 row 2; column 2 row 2; column 5 row 4" — in the same chunked form the game is teaching, so it is playable without seeing the grid at all. Nothing is signalled by colour alone: a lit cell shows a disc, a mark shows a diamond, and the answer screen uses a tick, a cross and a hollow ring.

Five by five, seven sizes from three cells up to nine, and three wrong rounds. Nine is the ceiling on a board this small on purpose: past that, a set is more than a third of the grid and the cells left dark become easier to remember than the ones lit, so the game would be measuring the board rather than you. Every set is drawn from the day's seed without replacement, so it is always exactly the size the board claims, it is never the same cell twice, and the daily grid is the same grid for everyone. This is a memory game, not a diagnostic — it is not a clinical test, and a bad run means you were tired or distracted far more often than it means anything else.

Path Recall is the same idea with the order added back: a connected route across a grid, walked back one cell at a time, if you would rather train sequence than set. Sequence Echo does that with pads instead of cells. Pair Flip is the other grid memory game, and rewards remembering what you saw rather than how much of it you saw at once.

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