What comes next?

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Attempts:

Which comes next?

How to play Patterny

Patterny is a free daily what-comes-next visual puzzle. Everyone gets the same row of picture frames each day. Something changes from frame to frame by a simple rule: a shape turns, gains a dot, fills in, moves around the corners, changes shape or swaps size. Work out the rule and pick the frame that comes next.

How the puzzle works

Look along the row, then tap the option you think comes next and press Check (or press the letter A to F, then Check). If it's wrong, it's crossed out and a hint about the rule appears, and that pick uses up one of your six tries. The first hints tell you what to watch, later ones say exactly how it changes. Picking nothing, or something already crossed out, never costs a try. Every puzzle is checked so that exactly one option fits the rule, and every wrong option breaks it in a way you can see.

Each day is Easy, Medium or Difficult, shown on the badge. About half of all days are easy: four frames with one thing changing. About a third are medium: five frames with two things changing at once. Roughly one day in seven is difficult: three things changing at once. Mondays are always easy, and difficult days mostly land at the weekend.

Scoring and the helper

Pick the right frame first time and you earn 12 points; each wrong pick knocks it down to 10, 8, 6, 4 and then 2. A sixth wrong pick ends the day. Stuck? The helper crosses out two wrong options for you. It halves the day's score and is only available until your third wrong pick. When the day ends, you'll see the whole sequence and the rule written out.

Streaks and badges

Your play streak counts the days in a row you've played, and your solved streak counts the days in a row you've solved the puzzle. Play seven days running and you earn a 7-point bonus, or 14 points if you solved all seven. Miss a day and the streaks start again. A new puzzle arrives every day at midnight UTC.

Accessibility (colour-blind friendly play)

Patterny never uses colour as a rule. Everything that changes is a shape, a turn, a size, a fill pattern (empty, striped or solid), a number of dots or a corner position, so you can play it in black and white. Every frame and option is also described in words for screen readers. Turn on High contrast for black shapes with bolder outlines. Your setting is remembered. There's no clock, and nothing moves on screen.

Tips

Check one thing at a time: the shape, then its turn, then the fill, then the dots, then the corner square, then the size.

For turns, follow one point of the shape (like an arrow's tip) from frame to frame.

Things that don't change matter too: the right answer keeps them the same.

What Patterny trains

Pattern spotting. Finding the rule hidden in a row of shapes.

Abstract reasoning. Checking shape, colour, size, rotation and count.

Hypothesis testing. Trying a rule, then checking it against every step.

Did you know?

Pattern-completion puzzles are at the heart of many reasoning tests, such as Raven's Progressive Matrices, first published in 1938.

Good patterns often change two things at once, such as shape and rotation, which is what makes them tricky.

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