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A split-second memory game

Glance.

Look now.
Read it later.

A plate flashes for a blink. Don’t read it as it goes by:
let it land, then rebuild it from what stayed behind.

  1. 1
    Take it in whole

    One glance, from 300 ms down to 33. No left-to-right.

  2. 2
    Cut to blank

    Nothing new on screen, so the glance holds.

  3. 3
    Rebuild it

    Type the plate, or just the part the cue lights up.

Personal best · Climb0
4 CHARS · 300 MSBEST 0
Score0
Level1
Lives
A clean read goes up a level
One look. Then read it from memory.
3 lives · 12 levels · 1 glance each

One glance.

A plate flashes, then the screen goes blank. Type what you saw. Every clean read makes the next flash shorter.

Each right character scores 10 at this level. Clean reads in a row multiply the bonus, up to 4×.

A small reset for your mind.Type to read out · ? if unsure · Enter to submit · Esc to pause
LOOK NOW, READ LATER

Take it in, then read it.

A licence plate flashes, the screen goes blank, and only then do you type it. The trick is to not read while you look. Reading goes left to right, one character at a time, and the plate is gone before you finish. Take in the whole plate at once, look away, and read it from the image it leaves behind.

In 1960, Sperling flashed letter grids for 50 ms. People could report about four letters. But when a tone, played after the grid was gone, said which row to report, they got almost the whole row. They had seen far more than they could read out in one go.

Modes
Easy, Medium, Hard and Harder are sets of 10 plates at one fixed speed, with no lives: Easy flashes LL·NN for 200 ms, Harder LLLL·NNN for 50 ms, with cues. Climb is the adaptive run below. Each mode keeps its own best.
Didn’t see it?
Looked away or blinked? Tap Didn’t see it and the plate is shown, with no score and no penalty. It still uses up a plate in a fixed set. For a single character you can’t recall, type ? instead of guessing: it counts as a miss, but you don’t have to make one up.
Cued rounds
On Hard, Harder and from level 7 of Climb, a marker appears under the plate a tenth of a second after it goes. On half the rounds it marks only part of the plate, and you read out just that part. You can’t know which part ahead of time, so keep the whole glance. The marker sits below the plate, never where the characters were, since anything drawn there can erase them. The end screen compares your whole-plate and cued scores.
Why the blank
The glance can last a few seconds, but anything new you see wipes it. So between the flash and the readout, the screen doesn’t change at all until the cue or the readout.
The format helps
Plates go letters, then digits: LL·NN at first, up to LLLL·NNN. There is no I, O or Q: on the keyboard, keys that can’t go in the current slot are dimmed. Knowing the shape packs six characters into two chunks.
Plate, Random or Digits
Plate is letters then digits. Random puts any letter or digit in any slot, like Sperling’s letter grids: with no format to lean on, it tests the glance itself. Digits is numbers only, grouped like a plate. Each works with every mode and keeps its own best scores.
Climb and scoring
A clean read goes up a level: a shorter flash, a longer plate, a longer blank, or cues. Any wrong character goes down a level and costs a life; the run ends after 3. Each right character scores 10 plus 5 per level, and clean reads in a row add a bonus. The top bar shows how long the last plate was really on screen, in frames your display drew.