How to play
Press Start. After a short pause the board plays a sequence of one pad, and you repeat it. Get it right and the same sequence plays again with one new pad added to the end — the earlier steps never change, so what you are memorising only ever grows at the back. The level number is simply how many steps are in the current pattern.
Each pad lights for half a second and, with sound on, plays its own fixed note. The interval between pads is where the difficulty lives: it starts at 260 milliseconds and is trimmed by 12 milliseconds every level until it bottoms out at 110, which happens somewhere in the low teens. After that the playback tempo stops changing and the only thing still growing is the length of what you must hold.
The Step readout shows how far through the current pattern you are — 5 / 9 means five correct so far with nine to reproduce. Best level is the longest sequence you have completed correctly, banked the moment you finish repeating it, so it reflects what you actually did rather than the level you died on.
Controls
- Mouse or touch: press a pad. Your press lights it briefly and plays its note, so you always get confirmation of what registered.
- Keyboard: the number keys 1 2 3 4 map to the four pads in reading order, and they only respond once a game has been started. Each pad is also a real button, so tabbing to one and pressing space works and each is announced with its own name.
- Sound on / off: shares the site-wide sound preference, so switching it here switches it everywhere.
- Forgiving / Strict: how a wrong pad is punished. Remembered between visits.
Chunking, and why the sound is not decoration
Nobody memorises eleven separate presses. Beyond about five items, raw memory for a list of things falls apart, and players who reach the double digits have all done the same thing: they stopped storing steps and started storing groups.
The practical version is to break the sequence into chunks of three or four as it plays, and rehearse them as units. A pattern of 2-2-4-1-3-3-1 is far easier to keep as "double-two-four" then "one-three-three-one" than as seven separate items. Because every level appends to the end and never rewrites the beginning, your existing chunks stay valid forever and each new level only asks you to extend the final one — and when that last chunk reaches four, start a new one.
The second technique is to say it. Speaking the numbers under your breath while the board plays uses a different memory system from the one holding the picture, and the two together are considerably more durable than either alone. It also stops the most common error, which is not forgetting the sequence but losing your place in it.
That is also why the sound is worth leaving on. Four separated notes turn the sequence into a short tune, and a tune is stored as a single object rather than a list of positions. Turning sound off does not just remove feedback, it removes an entire encoding channel — which is exactly why it is a good way to make the game harder once your best level has plateaued.
Finally, resist the urge to answer fast. There is no clock on your input at all: the game waits indefinitely for each press, so the only thing hurrying gains you is a slip on a pad you already knew. In forgiving mode, if you do slip, watch the replay as a fresh sequence rather than trying to confirm the part you thought you knew.
Levels we reached while working through both modes, as estimates: in forgiving mode, level 8 is a comfortable result, level 12 means chunking has become automatic, and past 15 you are in genuinely difficult territory. Strict mode typically costs three to four levels off the same player's forgiving result. With sound off, expect to lose another two or three. A full level 12 playback takes around eight seconds to watch, which is a long time to hold a shape you have only seen once.
The toy this comes from
The original Simon was a Milton Bradley product, launched in 1978 and designed by Ralph H. Baer — the engineer behind the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home games console — together with Howard J. Morrison. It was a black plastic disc with four large coloured lenses, and it was introduced at a launch party at the nightclub Studio 54 in New York, an unusually theatrical debut for a toy. Its inspiration was an Atari arcade machine called Touch Me from 1974, which had the same idea and, by Baer's own account, sounded terrible; getting the tones right was a deliberate part of the redesign, and the four notes were chosen so that any random sequence would still sound musical.
Our version keeps the structure and takes its own approach to the details. The four tones here are C4, F4, A4 and D5, spaced far enough apart to be told apart on a phone speaker. The sequence is not generated in advance: a new pad is drawn from your browser's cryptographic random source at the start of each level, so no two runs share a pattern and there is nothing to learn by repetition. Playback timers are all tracked and cancelled together, which means pressing Start over mid-sequence stops the old pattern cleanly instead of letting two of them overlap.
Questions players ask
What does strict mode change?
In forgiving mode your first wrong pad in a level just replays the same sequence; a second ends the run. In strict mode the first wrong pad ends it. The choice is remembered on your device.
Does the playback speed up forever?
No. The gap between flashes shrinks by 12 milliseconds a level from 260 down to a floor of 110, reached in the low teens. After that only the length grows.
Can I play with the sound off?
Yes — the lit pad is always the main cue. But the notes are a second way of encoding the pattern, so playing in silence is meaningfully harder, not just quieter.
Which level gets recorded as my best?
The longest one you completed, banked as soon as you finish repeating it. The level you failed is never counted.