Sort Race

Three crates open the run, each printed with a plain whole number — 12, 41, 7. Hide the counts and the shelf stays exactly where it was, every crate blank. Now name the smallest one, then the next smallest, working up to the largest. Get a whole shelf in order and the next one has one more crate, from three up to eight. The crates never move while you are naming them, so what you have to hold is which position held which count — and then what you have to do with it is put those counts in order, which turns out to be the harder half.

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 shelf while the counts are showing. Nothing is running down: the counts stay up until you hide them, so take as long as you want. Look for the shape of the row rather than eight separate numbers — where the small ones cluster, which end the biggest is at.
3. Hide the counts with Enter, or by clicking any crate. Every crate turns to a question mark and the shelf stops giving anything away.
4. Name the smallest count first. The left and right arrow keys move the outlined cursor along the shelf, Enter names the crate under it, or click a crate directly. Up and down step along the same shelf, because on a narrow screen it wraps onto a second line.
5. Watch each pick land. A crate that really was the smallest left opens up with a tick and the position you gave it — 1, 2, 3 — and its count comes back on show. Work up until the whole shelf is in order.
6. A wrong pick ends that round. The crate you named gets a cross, every count comes back so you can see the row you were actually holding, and it costs you one of your two wrong picks for the whole run. Press anything to move on.
7. Keep going. Each new round adds one crate. The status row carries the number that matters: Best list, the longest shelf you have actually put in order.

Why is it harder to put things in order from memory than to remember them?

Because ordering is not one more thing to remember, it is a different quantity that grows much faster. Holding six counts is six facts, and adding a seventh crate adds one. But the order is not a property of any crate on its own — it lives in the comparisons between them, and six crates have fifteen pairs while seven have twenty-one. One more crate to hold; six more comparisons that all have to come out right. That is the whole reason this game exists as a separate thing from a plain memory span: you can finish a round certain you recognised every number on the shelf and still be unable to say which of two middling ones came first, because recognising them and ranking them are not the same work. The board prints the pair count every round — Pairs to order — so you can watch the two lines pull apart instead of taking my word for it.

What is the trick for holding a shelf of numbers?

Anchor the ends first, then chunk the middle. The smallest and the largest stick almost for free — they stand out on the shelf while the counts are showing, and you rarely lose them. What ends runs is the middle, where three counts sit within ten of each other and none of them is remarkable. So do not try to memorise five numbers; memorise the shape: "small pair on the left, the big one third from the end, two middling ones next to each other on the right". That is two or three chunks instead of six facts, and it survives the hide. It is the same move that makes a phone number holdable in three pieces rather than ten digits, and you will feel it start to matter at five crates, which is roughly where naming them one at a time gives out.

Can two crates ever hold the same number?

No, and that is guaranteed by how the shelf is built rather than checked afterwards. The counts for a round are drawn without replacement from the pool of whole numbers between 3 and 48, so no value can come out twice. That matters more than it sounds: with a tie there would be two correct answers at some point in the round and no way for you to know which one the game wanted, so a loss could be bad luck instead of a mistake. Because every count is distinct, every comparison is strict, the ascending order is the only one there is, and exactly one crate is the right pick at every moment.

Is the shelf ever already in order?

Never, and neither is it ever exactly backwards. Both are checked before a round is dealt. An already-ascending shelf would be won by tapping left to right while remembering nothing at all, and a reversed one by tapping right to left — either way a whole round collapses into one fact you noticed during the reveal, and the list length at the end would be flattering you. So the arrangement is measured first: the game counts the pairs standing out of order, which is exactly the number of neighbour swaps it would take to sort the shelf, and it keeps the arrangement only when that count sits away from both extremes. There is a guaranteed fallback arrangement that always satisfies the rule, so the check can never fail to produce a shelf.

How long do the counts stay up?

As long as you like. There is no clock anywhere in this game — the reveal is counted in moves rather than seconds, so reading slowly costs nothing, a screen reader gets exactly as long as the announcement takes, and the same round plays identically on a five-year-old phone and a new laptop. There is a generous upper bound so the board can never sit there stuck with the answer on it, and the bound is measured rather than guessed: a shelf that is badly scrambled is allowed longer than a nearly ordered one, because it genuinely is more to hold.

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 length of the shelf you got in order.

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

Both, fully. Every crate is a button labelled with its position, its count when the count is on show, and what has happened to it in plain words. Nothing is signalled by colour alone: a placed crate carries a tick and the position you gave it, the pick that ended a round carries a cross, a crate you never reached carries a dot, and a hidden count is a question mark. The live region reads out the counts during the reveal — exactly what a sighted player can see, no more — then goes quiet about them the moment they hide.

Six rounds, from three crates up to eight, with two wrong picks for the whole run. Eight is the ceiling on purpose: unaided immediate span runs somewhere around seven items, ordering costs more than holding, and a run that reaches eight has already passed the point this game is about — a longer shelf would mostly be measuring your patience. Counts are whole numbers between 3 and 48, drawn fresh each round from the day's seed, so the daily shelf is the same shelf for everyone and any round can be reproduced exactly. The score rewards a scrambled shelf more than a tidy one, because sorting it is more work, but the number worth reading is Best list rather than the score. This is a memory game, not a diagnostic: a poor run means you were tired or distracted far more often than it means anything else.

Number Span is the same task with the ordering taken out — a run of digits typed straight back — so playing both in one sitting shows you the gap this game is about. Recall Grid asks for a set of cells in any order you like, which separates which from when again. Story Order keeps the order but ties it to the sequence you were shown rather than to a value, and Sequence Echo is the shortest version of all of them. Rank Sort drops the memory entirely and leaves you sorting a row you can see, if you want the other half on its own.

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