Palace Run

A memory palace stores what you want to remember at places along a route you know well, so you can walk the route in your mind and find each thing where you left it. Palace Run is that route as an arcade game. A runner leaves something at each landmark on the first lap, and on the second a ghost at each place asks you what was left there.

How to play

1. Choose a level and press START.
2. On lap 1 the runner follows the route on its own. At each place something drops into the slot above the landmark and stays there for a few seconds. Picture it at that place, then the run moves on. There is nothing to press on this lap.
3. On lap 2 the runner goes round the same route again, and a ghost stops it at each place. Three choices open under the playfield. Pick the one you left there by tapping it or pressing 1, 2 or 3. You get one pick at each place.
4. A right pick bursts the ghost. A wrong pick trips the runner, costs one of your 3 hearts and shows what was really there.
5. After lap 2 a new round starts with new things to remember, and each one stays on show for less time. The game ends when your hearts run out.

The wrong choices are mostly things you will meet later on the same route, so it is not enough to remember what you saw. You have to remember where you saw it.

On a keyboard, 1, 2 and 3 pick, and Escape or Space pauses. Pausing covers the playfield and hides the things and the choices, so it cannot buy time to look again. Practice mode coaches you as you play, a wrong pick costs no heart, the look time never gets shorter, and scores are not saved. END PRACTICE on the pause screen ends a practice game.

Scoring

• A right pick scores 100, plus up to 50 for speed. The speed bonus is full the moment the choices open and shrinks to nothing over 5 seconds. Pausing while the choices are open ends that pick's speed bonus.
• A wrong pick scores nothing and costs a heart.
• A perfect round, with every pick right, scores 20 more for each place and gives one heart back, up to 3.

For example, a perfect round at 5 PLACES with every pick made at once scores 750 for the picks and 100 for the perfect round, 850 in all.

Your five best scores at each level are saved in this browser, with the round you reached. Practice games are not saved.

Levels

• 5 PLACES runs past the Gate, the Well, the Oak, the Bridge and the Tower, and each thing stays on show for 3 seconds in the first round.
• 10 PLACES adds the Mill, the Barn, the Pond, the Cave and the Shrine, and each thing stays on show for 2.5 seconds.
• NUMBERS runs the first five places with a number from 00 to 99 at each, on show for 5 seconds, and lap 2 asks for the number back. The Major System turns each number into a picture you can leave at a place.

Each new round cuts the look time by 10%, down to 1.2 seconds at the place levels and 2.5 seconds at NUMBERS. The game remembers the level you chose last, and each level keeps its own high scores.

New to memory palaces? Learn how to build a memory palace, read about the method of loci, and see how to reuse memory palaces. Or try our other free memory games.