Play Memory Grid Online
About Memory Grid
Memory Grid is a pattern-recall puzzle. A handful of cells on the board light up together, then the lights go out and it is up to you to mark every cell you remember being lit: no more, no fewer, and each one has to be right.
Every board here is generated fresh from a random seed, so the seed lives in the page URL and you can bookmark or share a specific puzzle and return to the exact same pattern later. Pick a difficulty above (from a gentle 5×5 up to a demanding 8×8) to start.
The four difficulties change two things about the reveal at once, not just the grid size: the pattern itself grows from 6 lit cells to 16, and the study window shrinks from 3 seconds to 2.5 on Hard and Expert, so a harder board asks you to take in more information in less time rather than simply remembering more of the same. Grouping the lit cells into rows or shapes as you study, instead of memorizing coordinates one at a time, is what tends to survive the shorter reveal.
How to play Memory Grid
- A pattern of cells lights up on the board for a few seconds: study it before it disappears.
- Once the reveal ends, mark every cell you remember being lit. Tapping or clicking a cell toggles its mark; nothing you do during the reveal itself places a mark.
- The puzzle judges itself the instant you have placed as many marks as the pattern had cells; there is no separate submit step.
- Every mark has to be a cell that was actually lit: marking the right number of cells but even one wrong one loses the round and reveals the true pattern.
- Pausing mid-reveal freezes the countdown exactly where it stopped, since the reveal runs on the same clock as the timer in the corner. Resuming picks the reveal back up rather than restarting it.
Controls (touchscreen)
- Tap a cell to mark it once the reveal has ended. Tapping during the reveal does nothing.
Controls (PC)
- Click a cell to mark it once the reveal has ended. Clicking during the reveal does nothing.
- Arrow keysUse the Arrow keys to move the highlighted cell cursor around the board.
- SpaceEnterPress Space or Enter to mark or unmark the cursor’s cell.
Every Memory Grid puzzle is fair
There’s no solver behind Memory Grid because there’s nothing to search for: the lit pattern the generator draws is the solution by construction, exposed to you the same way a Sudoku’s starting digits are exposed. The only randomness in the whole puzzle happens before the reveal ends. Once the lights go out, marking the pattern back correctly is entirely a test of what you retained, not a guess against hidden information.
The reveal countdown itself is computed live from the session clock rather than stored anywhere, which is what lets pausing freeze it exactly where it stopped instead of quietly costing you study time; there’s no separate timer to drift out of sync with what’s on screen. A loss reveals the full pattern, and Retry replays that same board from the top, study window included, so a second attempt tests how well you hold on to what you just saw rather than a pattern you’ve never seen.