Number Recall

The board, and how you win

The board is a small square grid — 3×3, 4×4 or 5×5. Only some of its cells hold a tile and the rest are empty. There are always empty cells, because the tiles never fill the grid.

The tiles are numbered from 1 upwards with no gaps and no repeats, so a board holding 9 tiles holds 1 to 9. You win a round by tapping every tile in order, from 1 to the last one, while they are face down. Getting all of them is the only thing being asked.

• A tile carries a number and nothing else — no pictures, no symbols. A digit reads the same in every language the app ships in, and text baked into a picture cannot be translated.
• A face-down tile is blank. It shows no number, and a screen reader does not read one out either, because reading it out would be handing over the answer.
• There are three kinds of slot and each is told apart by its face rather than by its colour: a tile showing its number, a face-down tile (blank and raised), and an empty cell (flat, part of the board).
• The board is drawn as wide as the column allows, so even a 5×5 keeps its tap targets big enough on a phone. Nothing larger than 5×5 exists.
• The change between face up and face down is a short transition. With Reduce motion on, it switches over instantly instead.

Memorise, then recall

A round has two halves, and you control the seam between them. It opens with every tile face up and its number showing, and the line above the board reads "Take your time. Tap 1 when you are ready." That line is the literal rule: nothing is counting down, and the tiles stay up until you act.

The moment you tap 1, every other tile turns face down. That is the end of the memorising, and it happened because you did something. From there you tap 2, 3 and on from memory; each tile you get right turns face up again and stays that way, so the part you have already recovered is visible while you work on the rest.

• Tapping is the only control. There is no drag, no confirmation step and nothing to hold down.
• Once the recall starts, the line above the board changes to Next and the number you owe. It is read out as it changes, so the number you are looking for is never a cue you can only see.
• Tapping an empty cell does nothing at all. Empty cells are not buttons — they are the shape of the board, not part of the question.
• Tapping a tile that is already face up does nothing either, and neither of these counts as a mistake. You did not name the wrong tile; you pressed something that was not being asked about.
• The top bar shows how many tiles you have recalled and how many the round holds. How much is left is a fact, not a device for hurrying you.

The time includes the time you spent looking

No clock is shown while you play. The time is recorded quietly and appears when you finish and in your statistics — and it runs from the start of the round, so the seconds you spend memorising are inside it.

That single decision is what lets the game be timed without ever putting you on a timer. Looking longer makes the recall safer and the time worse; cutting the look short makes it faster and riskier. Choosing where to sit between those two is the game, and it is also why no time limit is needed: the pressure is already in the record rather than in a countdown.

• Each level keeps one record, its fastest clear, and shows it on the level itself. Beating that is the reason to go back to a level you have already finished.
• Finished first try counts the rounds you cleared at the first attempt, before any retry. It is shown as a fact and nothing is made of it.
• Failures are not counted against a level. The layout you missed is already gone, so a "times failed" number would be counting boards that no longer exist.
• Statistics are kept per board size — games played, games cleared, fastest clear, finished first try and total play time — alongside the level you have reached, levels finished and dailies finished.
• There is no score. Nothing here is converted into points, a rank or a rating, and there is no ranking to compare against.

Games played counts rounds, so a retry is a round of its own and the number is always at least as large as games cleared. A round you walked away from was still a round.

A wrong tile ends the round, and what you get instead of Undo

Tap the wrong face-down tile and the round is over. The whole board then turns face up so you can read the layout you were working from, and the tile you needed is ringed. The panel that says so sits below the board rather than on top of it, precisely so that it does not cover the thing it is announcing.

Nothing about that reveal is on a timer. It waits until you choose to move on, for exactly the reason the memorising does: a reveal that expired would be the app deciding how long you get to look.

• There is no Undo. A tap is the claim that you remember where that number was. If you could take it back, the round would become a search rather than a recollection, and there would be nothing underneath it.
• There is no Hint. The only hint this game could give is where the next tile is, and that is the answer itself.
• New layout is the help you get instead — a fresh arrangement at the same level, instant, free and as often as you like. Same board size, same number of tiles: a different question of the same difficulty.
• There are no lives, no continues and no "one more look". Every one of those is a thing that could later be sold, and failing here is meant to be cheap instead.
• Retries are unlimited and free, and no game feature is ever behind an ad or a purchase.

This is the opposite conclusion from Memory Match in the same collection, which hands you the same board back. It can, because its game is turning cards over: you never have the whole layout in front of you, so the same board is still something to work out. Number Recall shows you everything at the start and shows the whole answer again after a miss — so returning the same layout would be asking you to read back what you had just seen. The level fixes the difficulty; only the arrangement changes.

The 100 levels and the Daily Challenge

Levels run 1–100 and unlock in order: finishing one opens the next. Any level you have unlocked can be picked again at any time, and finishing a level offers Next Level and New layout side by side.

Difficulty here has two knobs — how big the board is and how many tiles sit on it — and they are never turned at the same time. Each band opens on the tile count the band before it closed on, so when the board grows, the board growing is the only thing that changed.

• Inside a band the tile count climbs evenly, so the first level of a band sits at its floor and the last at its ceiling. The step up from 9 tiles to 12 is spread across the whole of the 5×5 band.
• New layout moves a level on to its next arrangement, never the one whose answer you were just shown. How many tries you have had is not stored, though, so a level you leave and come back to opens on its first arrangement again.
• Every layout is built on your device from a seed, so nothing is downloaded and the same try at the same level is the same layout on every device. No constraint is placed on where the numbers land — a rule such as "consecutive tiles must not touch" would mean redrawing until a layout passed, and redrawing skews which layouts you end up seeing.
• The Daily Challenge is one board a day and is always 5×5 with 9 tiles. No day of the week is harder than another.
• The last 30 days are listed and every one of them is open with no condition attached. A day you finish is recorded with the time of the round you completed, and a retry inside the same day is a new arrangement too.
• No streak is counted or shown anywhere, so skipping a day costs you nothing.

Getting better at it

Time is the only record, and the look is inside it. Improving is mostly about learning what a good look actually needs to capture, rather than about tapping faster afterwards.

• Memorise the route, not the picture. You will tap 1, 2, 3 and on in that order, so what you need is the path from each number to the next. Holding the layout as a whole is more than the round asks of you.
• Fix the two ends first. 1 is where the recall starts and the highest tile is where it stops; placing those two against a corner, an edge or a gap gives everything in between something to hang on.
• Use the empty cells as landmarks. There are always some, and "the one just under the gap" is easier to keep than a row and a column number.
• Chunk the long ones. On a 5×5 holding 12 tiles, 3 runs of 4 are easier to carry than 12 separate positions.
• Know when to stop looking. The seconds before your first tap are in your time, so one more sweep of the board eventually costs more than the mistake it would have prevented.
• When you miss, read the ringed tile against what you thought you had. The board is fully face up and waiting, and that is the only moment the game shows you where your memory actually went wrong.

Questions people ask