🟩 Simon Says
Memory · Free online · No download · No sign-up
Simon Says lights up a sequence of coloured panels, one at a time, accompanied by a distinct tone for each colour. You watch the sequence, then replay it in order. Each successful round adds one more colour to the end of the sequence. The early rounds are trivially easy — three or four colours is nothing. By round twelve you are maintaining a thirteen-element sequence in working memory, and by round twenty you have either developed a chunking strategy or you have hit the wall of your raw memory span. World record holders reach sequences longer than fifty — not through raw memory but through trained encoding.
How to play Simon Says
- Watch and listen as the game lights up the sequence of panels one at a time.
- When the sequence finishes, the panels stop flashing — now it is your turn.
- Tap the panels in the same order the game showed them. Each correct tap earns a point.
- A wrong tap ends the round and shows your final score.
- Each successful round adds one new colour to the end of the sequence for the next round.
- Your goal is to reach the highest round number before making an error.
Tips to beat your high score
- Assign verbal labels to each colour. Use short, distinct words: “red” is fine, but “fire” for red and “sky” for blue create richer memory hooks. Saying the labels silently as each colour flashes encodes the sequence in your phonological loop alongside the visual trace.
- Chunk into groups of three. The phonological loop naturally groups information into rhythmic units. Mentally package every three colours as a single unit, give the triplet a label, and chain the labels together.
- Use tonal rhythm. Each colour has a distinct tone. Listen for the rhythm of the sequence — fast-fast-slow, or two highs then a low — and encode the melody rather than just the colours. Musicians generally outperform non-musicians on Simon Says precisely because they process the audio component.
- Replay in your head before tapping. After the sequence finishes, spend one to two seconds running it through your internal voice before touching the first panel. This consolidation step significantly reduces early errors.
- Accept your span limit gracefully. Most untrained adults top out around 7–9 elements. Rather than trying to brute-force a longer sequence, focus on encoding strategies that compress information — this is how trained mnemonists reach sequences of 20 or more.
What this game trains your brain to do
Simon Says directly exercises the phonological loop — the inner voice that lets you rehearse verbal information — and the visuospatial sketchpad — the mental notepad for visual and spatial information. Both are subsystems of working memory as described by Alan Baddeley’s influential model. The reason sequence memory games improve with practice is not that your capacity increases dramatically, but that you learn to pack more information into each memory slot through chunking — a skill that transfers to language learning, music, and procedural skill acquisition.
Sequence memory is also closely linked to pattern learning, the process by which the brain identifies statistical regularities in a stream of stimuli. People who regularly practise sequence repetition games show enhanced implicit pattern learning even when the sequences are random, suggesting that the training sharpens the brain’s general ability to extract structure from temporal information — a capability central to language comprehension, music appreciation, and situational awareness.
About Simon Says
Simon Says is based on the electronic toy invented by Ralph Baer and Howard Morrison and released in 1978. The original game sold more than twenty million units worldwide, demonstrating that sequence memory has universal appeal across ages and cultures. CrizBrain’s version keeps the same core mechanic — watch, listen, repeat — with a clean browser interface that requires no hardware.
Your highest round reached is saved privately on your device. Every game on CrizBrain runs entirely in your browser with no account and no data sharing. Challenge yourself to beat your record, or pass the phone to a friend and compare where each of you hits the wall.