Color Span Game

How many colors can you hold in mind at once? Colors drop into a glowing lane one at a time, light up for a moment, and flip face down. Tap them back in the same order. Get every one right and the next round has one more color. It works like the digit span test that psychologists use to measure working memory, with colors in place of digits, and the ladder on the left shows how far your span has climbed.

How to play

1. Watch the lane. Each color drops into its slot, lights up, and flips face down before the next one lands.
2. When the message says it is your turn, tap the colors back in the order they landed, using the six color keys under the lane. UNDO clears your last pick.
3. Once every slot is filled, the tiles turn over one by one. Get them all right and the ladder climbs one rung: the next round has one more color.
4. A wrong color costs a life, and the next round has the same number of colors again. The game ends when your 3 lives are gone.

The first round has 3 colors, or 4 or 5 if you pick them on the start screen. Each color shows for 1.5 seconds at Relaxed, 1 second at Normal and 0.6 seconds at Quick. Your own turn has no clock, so take as long as you need.

The six colors are red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple, and each one carries its own mark: a circle on red, a triangle on orange, a square on yellow, a diamond on green, a star on blue and a plus on purple. If two of the colors look alike to you, go by the marks. A screen reader names each color and its mark as it lands. On a keyboard, press 1 to 6 for the colors, in the order of the keys, and Backspace to undo. Escape or Space pauses, and the lane is covered while the game is paused.

Scoring

• Your result is your best span: the most colors you got right in one round.
• Your score is your best span times 100, plus the colors in all your clean rounds, up to 99. So a best span of 7 with 25 colors in clean rounds scores 725.
• A longer run at the same best span scores higher, but a better span always beats any number of clean rounds.

Your five best scores at each speed are saved in this browser, with the best span of each game.

What a span test measures

A span test measures how much you can hold in mind at once, the part of memory that psychologists call working memory or short-term memory. In the classic digit span test, someone reads you a row of digits and you say them back. Most adults manage about seven, give or take two. Colors are harder for many people than digits, because there is no habit of saying them in a row, so a span of five or six is a good start.

Ways to hold more colors

Say the colors to yourself as they land, and say them again from the start each time a new one drops in. Then group them: three colors make a chunk that is easier to hold than three single colors, and two chunks are easier than six colors.

For longer spans, give each color a number and turn the row into digits. With red as 1 up to purple as 6, as the keys run, a row of red, yellow, blue is 135, and digits can become pictures with the Number Shape System or the Major System. You can also give each color a picture of its own, as in mnemonic images for colors, and link the pictures into a short story.

Try our other free memory games.