Shape Count

Triangles, squares, circles and diamonds appear on a small grid. You look, you hide them — and only then does the game tell you which shape it wanted counted. So there is no shortcut: you have to carry every tally out of the board, not just the one you were told to watch. Ten rounds, one more shape each time, and at the end you get the number that matters — how you did on tallies of four or fewer against how you did above four. Almost everyone falls off a cliff at about four, and watching your own numbers do it is the point of the game.

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 outlined.
2. Look at the shapes. They stay on screen until you hide them, so take as long as you like. Count each kind separately: two triangles, five squares, one circle. You are not told which one will be asked about, so all of them matter.
3. Hide the board with Enter or Space, or by tapping it. The grid goes blank and the question appears: how many squares were there?
4. Pick your answer. Four candidate numbers sit in a row. Left and Right move between them, Enter commits the one you are on, or click a number directly. The four are always consecutive, so estimating will not save you.
5. Read the answer card. The board comes back with the shape you were asked about marked, and the true tally of every kind printed underneath. Press any key to go on.
6. Keep your lives. A wrong answer costs one of three. Get all ten rounds and the run is won, with the spare lives added to your score.
7. Read the split at the end. The result card reports your accuracy on tallies of four or fewer separately from your accuracy above four. That gap is the thing worth taking away.

How many things can you count at a glance?

About four. Up to three or four items you do not count them at all — you apprehend the number directly, instantly and almost without error, an effect named subitising in 1949 and demonstrated on scattered beans by Jevons as far back as 1871. Past four, something different happens: you start counting, one item at a time, and accuracy drops while the time it takes climbs steeply with each extra item. This game puts both regimes on the same board, so a round with three circles and seven squares is measuring two different mental operations at once. That is why the result card refuses to give you one number: an average across both hides the only interesting thing in the data, which is where your line sits and how steep the drop is on the other side of it.

Why does it only tell me which shape to count after the board is hidden?

Because naming it first turns the game into something else. If you know it is triangles, you sweep the board for triangles, ignore everything else, and the answer is settled while you are still looking — that measures visual search speed, and memory never gets involved. Asking afterwards makes you hold every tally on the board at once, which is the thing this game is actually about. It also makes the accuracy split honest: the small tally and the large tally on one board were encoded under the same conditions, rather than one of them being the only one you bothered to watch.

Can I get lucky by counting the wrong shape?

No, and that is guaranteed rather than hoped for. Every board is built so that no two shapes on it have the same tally — the generator draws strictly increasing counts that add up to the round's total, so a tie is impossible by construction and there is no rejected board or retry loop anywhere in it. If you counted the circles when you were asked about the squares, your number is wrong. That matters because a tie would let a mistake score, and every accuracy figure the result card prints would be inflated by hits nobody earned.

Is it timed?

There is no clock anywhere in this game. The board stays up until you hide it, and the reveal is counted in your own presses rather than in seconds — so reading slowly costs you nothing, and the same run plays identically on a five-year-old phone and a new laptop. If you walk away mid-round the board eventually closes itself, but only after several hundred presses' worth of ticks, which is far past anything a person does by hand.

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 accuracy figures at the end.

Why are the four answers always next to each other?

Because spread-out choices — 3, 6, 9, 12 — can be answered by estimating roughly how full the board looked, and estimating is precisely the shortcut this game exists to expose as insufficient. Consecutive candidates force an exact tally. The true answer is always one of the four, whatever the count, because the window is clamped to stay inside the range a board can actually produce.

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

Both, fully. While the shapes are up they are read out by name in reading order — "triangle, triangle, square, circle" — so you can count what you hear instead of what you see, and the list stops being available the moment you hide the board, exactly as the grid does. Nothing is carried by colour: the four kinds are four different shapes, the answer card marks the counted shape with a tick and your wrong pick with a cross, and every number on screen is also a word in the spoken channel.

Five by four cells, ten rounds, six shapes rising to fifteen, two kinds rising to four, and three lives. The ceiling is deliberate: fifteen shapes on twenty cells is already dense enough that the empty cells start to be easier to remember than the full ones, and past that the game would be measuring the layout rather than you. The largest tally a round can ask for is nine, which is why four consecutive candidates can always contain the answer. This is a game, not a diagnostic — a poor run means you were tired or distracted far more often than it means anything else, and nothing here is a clinical measure of anything.

Quick Count is the reflex version of the same boundary: the shapes flash and vanish on a timer, and the shape is named before you look, so it measures how fast you can search and count rather than what you can hold. Recall Grid asks which cells lit up rather than how many shapes there were, if you would rather train position than number. Number Span is the same "how much fits" question with digits.

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