In short
- Method of Action's five free web games — Kern Type, The Bézier Game, Shape Type, The Boolean Game and Color — remain the best single set for craft skills, and were all live at method.ac on 21 October 2026.
- Can't Unsee trains the judgement designers use most and practise least: spotting the subtly wrong version of an interface.
- For colour, X-Rite's free hue test measures discrimination once; Chromatch and DeltaE make a game of recognition and memory.
- Percore is the only one built as a daily measurement rather than a one-off game, with colour, contrast, brightness, shape, distance and rotation each scored over time.
- All of these train the specific judgement they test. None of them makes you a better designer by itself, and none claims to.
How this list was made
Each game was opened and each app checked against its own listing on 21 October 2026. Prices are what was shown on that date in US dollars. Nothing here is ranked by rating or popularity; the order follows the judgement trained, from letterforms through colour to space. Percore, the app this site belongs to, is included for what it measures and is not presented as a substitute for the craft games above it.
The games and apps
Kern Type
- Best for
- Letter spacing — the judgement that separates typeset from typed
- Platform
- Web
- Price
- Free
Mark MacKay's kerning game from Method of Action is the one most designers have played and the one most worth replaying. A word is shown with its letters badly spaced; you drag them until the spacing looks even, and you are scored out of 100 against the typographer's solution. The gap between where you put the letters and where a typographer did is precise, immediate feedback on a judgement most people have never had checked.
It is short, it has been live since 2011, and it remains the clearest example of what a design-eye game should be: one judgement, one measured answer.
The limit. A fixed set of words, so a second run partly tests your memory of the first.
The Bézier Game
- Best for
- The pen tool, and the discipline of using as few points as possible
- Platform
- Web
- Price
- Free
You trace an outline with a pen tool and are judged on how few anchor points you used to do it cleanly. The pen tool is the most avoided tool in vector software because it rewards planning over dragging; the game teaches the planning. It is as much about seeing where a curve changes direction as about the tool itself.
Anyone who draws icons, logos or illustrations in vectors will feel the difference in their work after a few rounds.
The limit. It trains tool craft more than visual judgement; there is no colour, spacing or proportion in it.
Shape Type
- Best for
- Letterform curves — seeing where a glyph goes wrong
- Platform
- Web
- Price
- Free
A letter is shown with one or more of its curves distorted, and you drag the control points until the letter looks right; you are scored against the original typeface. It trains the eye for the shapes of letters themselves — the thing a type designer sees that the rest of us only feel as "something is off".
Harder than Kern Type and more revealing: most people discover they can see that a curve is wrong long before they can see how.
The limit. Narrow by design; it is about glyph shape and nothing else.
The Boolean Game
- Best for
- Building shapes from unions, subtractions and intersections
- Platform
- Web
- Price
- Free
Given a target shape, you build it by combining simple shapes with boolean operations — union, subtract, intersect, exclude — in as few steps as you can. It is a puzzle game for spatial decomposition: seeing a complex form as a few simple ones overlapped, which is how icons and logos are actually made.
The most game-like of the Method of Action set, and the one that most directly trains a spatial rather than a visual judgement.
The limit. A construction skill rather than a perceptual one; it does not test how accurately you see.
Color (Method of Action)
- Best for
- Colour harmony — hue, saturation, complements, triads
- Platform
- Web
- Price
- Free
A colour wheel and a series of levels: match a hue, then a saturation, then a complement, then a triad, each against a timer. It is the only game in the set that treats colour as the designer's working model — hue, saturation and relationships on the wheel — rather than as pixels, and it makes the complement and triad relationships physical in a way a theory page cannot.
The timer is the point. Harmony is a judgement that should become fast.
The limit. The target is visible while you match it, so it trains relationships, not colour memory.
Can't Unsee
- Best for
- Spotting the subtly wrong interface
- Platform
- Web
- Price
- Free
Two near-identical iOS screens, one of them wrong by a small amount: spacing, alignment, size, colour, weight, hierarchy. You pick the correct one, across three rounds that get harder, and the score takes your response time into account. Made by an engineer and a product designer — Alex Kotliarskyi and Amanda Hum — it tests the review judgement rather than the making one, which is the judgement most designers exercise all day and almost never have checked.
Most people are humbled by round three. That is the information.
The limit. A fixed set of screens, and only iOS-style interfaces; once played, it is played.
X-Rite Online Colour Challenge
- Best for
- A single, serious measure of hue discrimination
- Platform
- Web
- Price
- Free
A simplified version of the Farnsworth-Munsell 100 Hue Test, the arrangement test colour-critical trades are assessed with: four rows of chips, ends fixed, dragged into hue order. Zero is perfect, and a circular graph shows where in the spectrum your discrimination is weakest. X-Rite is clear on the page that it is not a diagnostic tool and that monitor, lighting, fatigue and age all move the result.
Take it once on a calibrated screen in a dim room and keep the result. It is the closest a designer gets to a professional colour assessment for free.
The limit. A test, not a practice; repeating it teaches the chips.
Chromatch and DeltaE
- Best for
- Colour recognition and colour memory as games
- Platform
- iPhone and iPad
- Price
- Both free, as shown on their listings on 21 October 2026
Two colour games worth having on a phone. Chromatch shows a colour with six candidates, hides it after about a second and asks you to pick, scoring the difference with Delta E; it has a daily challenge, tiers and duels. DeltaE shows a colour, hides it, and asks you to rebuild it with hue, saturation and brightness sliders, scored with CIEDE2000, the standard colour-difference formula. The first trains recognition; the second trains reproduction, which is the harder and more useful skill.
Both are covered in more depth on the list of colour perception tests.
The limit. Neither keeps a history over weeks, so neither can show whether you are improving.
Percore
- Best for
- Measuring colour, contrast, brightness and spatial judgement daily, over time
- Platform
- iPhone
- Price
- Free daily practice; Pro US$39.99 a year or US$4.99 a week
Everything above is a game you play once or occasionally. Percore is a measurement you take daily. The free practice has four sessions: a colour that fills the screen, vanishes and is rebuilt on hue, saturation and brightness sliders; a pitch; a duration; and a triangle on a grid that vanishes and is put back by position, rotation and scale. Each is scored from 0 to 100 with the formula published, the targets are new every day and the same for everyone, and every session adds to a per-sense reading compared with your own recent weeks.
For a designer the relevant modules are Colour, and in Pro, Contrast (tell apart subtle shifts), Brightness (match light levels by eye), Shape, Distance (judge how far apart two points really are) and Rotation (read an angle and match it exactly). It makes no claim to improve your design; it claims to tell you, honestly, whether the judgements under your design are getting sharper.
The limit. No typography, no layout, no tool craft; it measures perception, not design.
Which one, for which judgement
| The judgement | Play |
|---|---|
| Letter spacing | Kern Type |
| Letterform curves | Shape Type |
| The pen tool and clean curves | The Bézier Game |
| Decomposing a shape into simple ones | The Boolean Game |
| Colour harmony on the wheel | Color (Method of Action) |
| Spotting the wrong interface | Can't Unsee |
| Hue discrimination, measured once | X-Rite hue test |
| Colour recognition and memory as a game | Chromatch, DeltaE |
| Colour, contrast, brightness and spatial judgement, measured daily | Percore |
What none of these does
Each of these trains the judgement it tests, and the research on perceptual learning is consistent that the gain stays close to the task. Kern Type makes you better at kerning; it does not make you a typographer. A sharp eye for colour does not choose the palette. The games are worth playing because the judgements they train are real and are rarely checked, not because any of them is a shortcut to taste. Taste is still built the slow way, by looking at a great deal of good work and making a great deal of bad work. These are for making sure your eye is reporting accurately while you do.
Measure the eye your design rests on.
Download on the App StoreFrequently asked
Are the Method of Action games still available?
Yes. Kern Type, The Bézier Game, Shape Type, The Boolean Game and Color were all live and free at method.ac on 21 October 2026, alongside Method Draw, the site's free vector editor.
Which game should a beginner start with?
Kern Type. It is short, the feedback is exact, and almost everyone discovers that their sense of even spacing is less reliable than they thought. Can't Unsee is the right second game.
Do these games make you a better designer?
They make the specific judgement each one tests more accurate, and that is all they claim. Design skill is built by looking at a great deal of good work and making a great deal of your own; these keep your eye honest while you do.
Is there a daily practice version of these?
Percore is built as one: colour, contrast, brightness, shape, distance and rotation as scored sessions with new targets every day and a record over weeks. It does not cover typography or tools.
Were these games tested?
Each web game was opened and each app checked against its own listing on 21 October 2026, and the descriptions stay within what was seen. Prices are as shown on that date; free web games can go offline, so if a link fails, the site may have moved.