Watch and repeat the flashing colour sequence in this free Simon Says memory game. How long a pattern can you remember?
🟥 Simon Says
Watch, then repeat the colour sequence!
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Register Free 🚀About Simon Says
Simon plays a sequence of colours and you repeat it back. Each round adds one more step, so the eighth round means reproducing eight in the right order. Four pads, no shortcuts, and a playback speed that gets sharply less forgiving as you move up the difficulties.
Listen to the rhythm, do not watch the colours
The best players stop tracking colour names and start tracking the pattern as a rhythm and a shape — a run of pads has a musical contour, and a melody of eight notes is far easier to hold than a list of eight words.
This is why the game works at all. Repeating 'red, blue, blue, yellow, green, red, green, blue' as words exceeds most people's working memory around item seven. The same sequence as a tune does not.
Chunk in threes
Once a sequence passes five or six, group the steps into blocks of three and remember the blocks. Two chunks of three plus a pair is three things to hold, not eight — the same technique that carries people past 10 digits in Number Memory at cerdikcerdik.com/games/number-memory.
Rehearse the chunks during playback rather than waiting for it to finish. The gap between Simon's last note and your first tap is where sequences fall apart, and the fix is to already be repeating it before that gap arrives.
Speed changes what you are being asked to do
Easy plays each step over 700 milliseconds, Medium 500 and Hard 320. At the slow end there is time to name each colour as it lights up. At 320ms there is not — the sequence arrives faster than you can verbalise it, so you have to encode it as motion and rhythm instead.
Players who reach round 10 on Easy and then stall at round 5 on Hard usually have not changed technique, only tried to do the slow technique quickly. The two speeds genuinely reward different strategies.
The mistake is almost never the last step
When a run ends, players tend to blame the newest addition. Far more often the error is in the middle — a pair that swapped places three or four steps back while attention was on the end of the sequence.
The practical fix is to replay the whole sequence in your head from the start, not just append the new step to a half-remembered beginning. The beginning is what decays while you are concentrating on the end.
Frequently asked questions
How many steps can most people remember?
Reaching round 8 or 9 is typical, and past 12 is strong. Players who get much further are almost always chunking the sequence or hearing it as a tune rather than memorising individual colours.
Does the sequence change every round?
No — each round replays the same sequence from the start and adds one new step at the end, so the beginning stays constant throughout a run.
Is there any pattern to the colours?
No, each new step is random. Any pattern you notice is coincidence, though noticing one is still useful if it helps you hold the sequence.
Should I play with sound on?
If you can, yes. Each pad has its own tone, and remembering the sequence as a melody is substantially easier than remembering it as a list of colours.