Brain games: five short games to play on their own
Memory Grid
Some squares light up. Then tap them in the same order. Get it right and one more square is added.
45 seconds. Your score is the longest sequence you got right.
Quick Tap
Tap the green dot with a check mark as fast as you can. Leave the blue squares with a cross alone.
45 seconds. Your score is how fast you usually reacted.
Pattern Sequence
You see a row of shapes that follows a pattern. Choose the shape that comes next. Get as many right as you can.
45 seconds. Your score is the number of correct answers.
Spot the Difference
You see two rows of five shapes. They match except in one place. Tap that place. Find as many as you can.
45 seconds. Your score is the number of differences you found.
Math Sprint
Solve the sums. Each right answer makes the next one a little harder. Get as many right as you can.
45 seconds. Your score is the number of correct answers.
Five games of 45 seconds that need no words: tap back a sequence of squares, react to dots, find the next shape in a pattern, spot the difference and do quick sums. Pick one and you play at once. After each round you see your game score.
Why these five
All five work without language. You don't have to read a text or know a particular language to play them, and the instructions for each fit in two or three short sentences. That makes them easy to play one at a time, even when you only have a minute.
Memory Grid asks you to tap back squares in the order they lit up. Quick Tap is about hitting the round dot and leaving the squares alone. In Pattern Sequence you pick the shape that continues a row. Spot the Difference has two rows of shapes with one change between them, and Math Sprint is a run of sums that gets harder as long as you keep getting them right.
How the game score works
Each game has its own raw result: the longest sequence of squares, your reaction time in milliseconds, or the number of right answers. We turn that into a game score from 0 to 100 on a fixed curve for each game. Which result gives which score, and why the curves sit where they do, is on our scoring reference.
The curves were fixed before there were any players. We show typical scores once enough people have played. In the full Brain Check, a comparison with other players appears once fifty people have completed it.
What a single round is, and what it is not
A round on this page is not saved. We count that a game was played, per game, without knowing who played it. So there is nothing to look back on later, and that is on purpose: you didn't ask us to keep anything, so we don't.
The score tells you how you played this game today. It depends on your device, the time of day and how often you have played before. The second round usually goes better because you know the game by then. It is not a medical test and not an IQ test.
The full Brain Check
If you play all five in a row, you get a game score for each and a Brain Check score, which is the average of the five. With the instructions in between that takes about five minutes, and it needs no account.
Four of the games also have their own page with more on how they work: the memory test, the reaction time test, the brain test and the attention test.
Frequently asked questions
- Are these brain games free?
- Yes. You play them here without an account or email address, as often as you like. The full Brain Check with all five games is free as well, and there is nothing to pay for on the English pages.
- Which of these games are in the Brain Check?
- All five. The Brain Check plays them one after another in the order of this page: Memory Grid, Quick Tap, Pattern Sequence, Spot the Difference and Math Sprint. Afterwards you see a score for each game and their average.
- Do these games train anything outside the games?
- We make no such promise. Studies of brain training mostly find that people get better at the games they practice, and that the effect on other tasks is small. What you get here is a short challenge and a score for each game.