Simon sequence

How to play

Press Start and watch. The board lights one pad, then goes quiet and waits for you to press the same one. That is level one. Clear it and the sequence keeps everything it had and adds one fresh step at the end, so level two is the pad you already knew plus a new one, level three is those two plus another, and so on for as long as you can hold the chain.

You cannot press anything while the machine is playing — input is ignored during playback, so there is no way to jump ahead or accidentally poison your own run with an early tap. When it is your turn, the step counter above the board shows how far through the sequence you are, which is useful when you lose your place halfway and need to know whether you are on the fourth or the fifth press.

Each new level plays back very slightly faster than the one before it, because the gap between pads shrinks as the sequence grows. There is a floor on that, so the game never becomes a blur; deep levels stay watchable, they just stop giving you comfortable thinking time between lights. Your best cleared level is stored on this device and shown in the third box, and Start over wipes the current run without touching that record.

Controls

• Mouse or trackpad: click a pad. It lights and sounds on the way down, exactly as it does during playback.
• Keyboard: Tab to any pad and press Space or Enter, or press 1 to 4 for green, pink, blue and amber without moving focus at all.
• Touch: tap a pad. The grid stays square and finger-sized down to small phone widths.
• Sound on or off: the tones are optional and the choice is remembered on this device.
• Forgiving or strict: forgiving replays the sequence once after your first mistake on a level; strict ends the run on any mistake.

Chunking, and why the sequence is shorter than it looks

Trying to hold a sequence as one long chain is the reason most runs stop early. Green, blue, blue, amber, pink, green, amber is seven separate things to keep in your head, and seven separate things is roughly where unaided short-term memory starts dropping items. But if you deliberately group them — green-blue, blue-amber, pink-green, amber — you are no longer holding seven items. You are holding four, and each one happens to unpack into two presses. That regrouping is called chunking, and it is the whole trick behind every high level in this game.

Pairs work well up to about level eight. Beyond that, triples are better: three groups of three feels dramatically lighter than nine steps in a row, even though it is exactly the same information. The important detail is to keep your grouping stable as the sequence grows. If your groups are "green-blue" and "blue-amber", do not silently reshuffle them into "blue-blue" and "amber-pink" when a new step arrives — add the new step to the end, start a fresh group when the current one is full, and leave the earlier groups exactly as they were. Runs collapse far more often from re-chunking mid-level than from genuinely forgetting a pad.

Say the colors to yourself as they light, even silently. Subvocalizing converts a visual sequence into a verbal one, and a short verbal list is something you can rehearse in a loop while you wait — which is precisely what visual memory does not let you do. Short names help; "green, blue, blue, amber" is easier to rehearse quickly than four long words would be. Some players go further and give each pad a single syllable or a number, then rehearse a string of digits, which is why the number keys exist on this version.

Sound is the second channel. When the tones are on, every pad gives you two independent copies of the same step: a position on the grid and a pitch. A rising or falling phrase is memorable in a way that a list of positions is not — you can often hum a nine-step sequence back before you can name it, and the hum will find the pads for you. This is also why the game refuses to depend on sound: the lit pad and the pad's label already carry everything, so anyone playing muted, or playing without seeing the colors, still has complete information. The tones only add a redundant route to the same answer.

Where the mechanic comes from

The idea descends from an electronic memory toy of the late 1970s: a round plastic unit with four large colored pads, each wired to its own tone, that played a lengthening sequence for the player to copy. It was one of the first genuinely successful electronic games that needed no screen at all, and the format traveled well because the rules fit in one sentence and the difficulty curve builds itself.

What we have taken is the mechanic, not the brand. This version was written from scratch for this site, with our own layout, our own tones, our own timing curve and our own forgiving mode, and it is not affiliated with, endorsed by or connected to any toy manufacturer. We have deliberately avoided quoting dates, names or sales figures we cannot verify — the interesting part was always the mechanic, and the mechanic is what is here.

Questions players ask