Dice Span Game

How many dice can you hold in mind at once? A leather cup rolls a few dice onto a felt table. Look at them while the bar along the rail runs down, then small numbered cups come down over them. Tap the faces back in order, from left to right. Every clean round adds one more die.

How to play

1. Choose a speed and how many dice to start with. At Normal speed each die shows for 1 second, so a round of 3 dice shows for 3 seconds. Relaxed gives each die 1.5 seconds, and Quick gives it 0.6 seconds.
2. The cup rattles and tips the whole roll onto the table at once. Look at the dice while the bar runs down.
3. Small numbered cups cover the dice. Tap the faces back in the order the dice lay, from left to right, with the six face keys under the table. There is no time limit for this part.
4. When the last face is in, the cups lift one at a time. A right face is ringed in green, and a wrong one in red with a cross.

A clean round, with every face right, adds a die to the next round. A round with any slip costs one of your three lives, and the next round has the same number of dice. The game ends when the last life goes.

On a keyboard, press 1 to 6 to tap a face, and Backspace to undo the last one. Escape or Space pauses. Pausing covers the table, so it never gives you extra time to look at the dice.

Scoring

Your result is your best span: the most dice you recalled cleanly in one round. The game over screen shows every round as a column of its own dice, with the missed rounds faded and the wrong dice outlined.

• Your score is your best span times 100, plus the dice in all your clean rounds, up to 99. So a best span of 7 with 25 dice in clean rounds scores 725, and a longer run at the same best span ranks higher.
• Each speed keeps its own high scores, because a die shown for 0.6 seconds is a harder test than one shown for 1.5 seconds. Your five best runs at each speed are saved in this browser.

About memory span

Dice Span trains working memory: holding a few things in mind for a short time and giving them back in order. Psychologists measure it with span tests. In the digit span test a tester reads out a list of digits and asks for them back, adding one each time until you slip. Most adults repeat about seven digits this way.

Dice are a span test you can see. Each die is one of six faces, and the roll sits in a row, so you can read it as a short number, group the dice in twos or threes, or remember the shape of the pips. Memory athletes stretch their span with techniques such as the Major System, which turns digits into pictures, and a memory palace, which gives each picture a place.

Try Radio Defense, a span game played by ear, read about memorizing numbers in a memory palace, or play our other free memory games.