Playset guide — pick the games, press play once

What this app does

Playset has six simple brain games: pair matching, sequence memory, find the different one, easy addition, colour and shape sort, and target tap. You pick only the ones you want, put them in the order they should run, give the list a name and save it. The same game twice is fine. One game on its own is fine.

Then the whole point: press play once. The first game starts, and when it ends the next one starts on its own. In between there is a short pause — press the big Next to move on straight away, or leave it and it goes by itself after a few seconds. Nobody has to sit there loading the next game every time.

Each game runs between 60 and 90 seconds. The buttons are deliberately oversized, and a wrong tap never brings up a red failure screen — it wobbles gently and the round carries on. There is no score, no leaderboard and no chart comparing today with yesterday.

How to use it

• Tap “New list” and give it a name. Something like “Morning ones” — naming it by when you open it makes choosing easier later.
• Tap the games you want from the six. Each tap adds it to the end of the queue underneath. Add a favourite twice or three times if you like — a list that is just pair matching three times over is a perfectly good list.
• Move a step up or down with the arrows, or take it out with ×. The order you see is the order it plays.
• Switch on “Start again at the end” and the last game rolls back round to the first. Use it when you want it to keep going until you decide to stop, rather than for a fixed length.
• Save, then press play. Along the top you get the list name, which step you are on, and the time left as a filling bar — not a number counting down at anyone.
• To stop part-way, press “Stop” at the top right. It asks once, then takes you back to your lists.
• Make as many lists as you like. A common way to use it is one short list and one longer one, picked depending on how the day is going.

What is not here

• No login and no sign-up. Open the address and start picking games. It never asks for an email or an age.
• No three-games-a-day lock. It is not “this many free, the rest in the paid plan” — everything you added gets played.
• No subscription and no payment screen. Not one of the six games is locked.
• No score, no rank, no “brain age”. It never tells anyone how they did and never compares today with yesterday. The little suns that fill in during a game are just a mark that disappears when the game ends.
• It is not a training programme. It never decides what today’s exercise should be — the person picking decides.
• It is not a test or a diagnosis. It is not a medical device and it tells you nothing about anyone’s health.

When people open it

It gets used by someone sitting next to another person, holding the phone. The games she likes are already settled, but the brain-training apps decide today’s set themselves and will not let you skip the ones she does not want — so every time a game ends, the phone comes back across the table to load the next one. That hand, needed over and over, was the problem.

The same thing gets said in Korean about Lumosity: “I only want to play Train of Thought.” One favourite, on repeat, which the app will not allow. Playset just lets you build that list — three rounds of pair matching, or two games alternating, exactly as written.

So in the morning you open the list and press play once. After that you hand the phone over and just sit with them. If a call comes in and the tab closes, opening it again offers the exact game it stopped on and carries on from there.

FAQ

The repeating questions are about how many games there are, what is locked, where things are kept, and what this measures. Below is the actual scope.