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👥 How Many Passed?
A parade crosses a narrow canyon and you count in your head how many passed. Your counter never appears on screen — this is memory, not a spreadsheet. Closest guess wins.
- Up to 4 players
- Party game
- In your browser, free
- With friends or against bots
The entire game in one rule
Between 26 and 44 figures cross the mouth of a canyon over roughly 36 seconds. You press a key for each one, and at the end you write down the total you think you saw. Whoever is least wrong wins.
Your counter is nowhere on screen while the parade runs, and that is the whole rule. With the number visible the game becomes press-and-check, and memory stops existing. A press gives you back only a visual pulse confirming it registered — the total lives somewhere you cannot consult.
Why it is harder than it looks
The difficulty comes from three things happening at once, across three planes of depth:
- At the back, high up, a tower with three zigzag ramps: tiny, slow figures.
- On the ledge, in the middle, they run, in packs of up to four.
- At the front, large and close — and about 45% of them stop in the middle of the gap, turn to face the camera, and only then leave.
A pause happening at the front while the tower and the ledge keep moving is what breaks the count of anyone trying to follow a rhythm.
The gap is narrow on purpose
Only whoever is inside the slot between the two rock walls exists. Each figure is visible for a short time, and that is what forces you to count as it happens instead of recounting later at your leisure.
A fairness rule guarantees two groups never share the same lane at the same time: stuck together on one line, no count would be possible at all. When no lane is free, the group is delayed in time — never overlapped. Overlap between different planes is depth, and that does happen.
The honest trap
One group can be worth more than one person. Sometimes a stack of two goes by, sometimes someone carrying another, sometimes a pack of four running together. Anyone counting shapes instead of bodies undercounts, and always in the same direction.
They also do not all move the same way: some hop, some roll, some walk and some run, each at their own cadence. Your eye cannot find a beat, and that is deliberate.
The roll call
When the parade ends, everyone files back past the front and a counter ticks up as each one crosses the middle post. Below the gap there is a ruler with every player's guess flagged on it — yours turns red the moment the counter passes it. This is the part of the game where you discover, slowly, the size of your error.
Equal error pays equally. Being three over and being three under finish in the same position.
Controls
- Computer: Space for each figure that passes.
- Phone: tap the screen.
- At the end, a field to type your total.
Against the bot
The bot counts with an error proportional to its level: the easy one is off by about 17% of the total, the hard one by about 4.5% — and it is exactly right in a third of matches. Since scoring is by proximity, a hard bot is beatable, but only by someone who actually counted.
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