A SMALL
STUDIO WITH
ONE RULE
The number has to mean something. Everything else on the page is negotiable — the score is not.
01
What this is
Oddly Hard is a collection of eight browser games built around one feeling: this looks simple, so why can't I do it? Quick tests for timing, memory, perception, estimation and geometry. Short rounds give you a measurable result. Each game has 12 challenge levels, from a gentle introduction to a harder finish, with progress saved in this browser.
There is no account, no download and no store page in the way. A URL is the whole product. Open it, play, get a score, close the tab — or don't, which is usually what happens.
The games are deterministic. The same seed always produces the same challenge, which is what makes a shared Daily fair and a bug reproducible.
What it deliberately isn't
It is not a brain trainer, an IQ test or a cognitive assessment. Those claims are easy to make and impossible to support, and they would turn a game into a health product overnight.
There are no percentiles either. Reaction timing is trivially scriptable — a handful of lines can pollute any distribution — and a polluted percentile is just an invented number wearing a lab coat.
So you get your own history instead: a personal best, a trend, and how far off you were this time.
02
The gate every game passes before it ships
01
Understood in 3 seconds
A diagram, not a tutorial carousel.
02
Natural on a phone
One thumb, 44px targets, CTA clear of the surface.
03
An unambiguous result
One value, one unit, one honest difference.
04
Replayable in one press
No interstitial, no reward animation, no delay.
05
Playable without an account
Guest is the only tier there is.
06
Fails fairly
No hidden controls, fake targets or misleading timers.
07
Keyboard-completable
Where the mechanic allows it, and stated where it doesn't.
08
Reviewed if nobody replays it
Silence is evidence for a human decision, never an automatic removal.
03
HOW A SCORE IS MADE COMPARABLE
Games use a 0–1000 scale for progress and Daily summaries. Difficulty varies between games and levels, so compare personal bests within the same mode and version. The curve below is the timing game’s scoring rule, not a measured population ranking.
Recalibrating a curve changes what a number means, so it always bumps the game version. Your old bests keep the meaning they had when you set them.
THE HONEST CAVEATS
Timing is device-dependent
Refresh rate, input hardware and browser scheduling all add latency. Compare yourself to yourself, on the same machine.
Colour is screen-dependent
Brightness, display mode and night-shift filters change the difficulty. Browsers can't reliably detect any of it, so we say so instead of faking a calibration.
Normalisation is provisional
Curves are anchored on estimates until a game has a thousand recorded runs at one version.
WHO MAKES IT
Oddly Hard is a product of Tiny Prism LLC, a very small studio in Wyoming.
Tiny Prism handles the legal and financial side and stays out of the product. If you're reading its name here, you're reading the fine print.
- GAMES LIVE
- 8
- ACCOUNTS
- 0
- TRACKERS
- 0
- CONTACT
- hello@oddlyhard.com
04
STILL READING?
Today's challenge takes ninety seconds and you will probably miss by a little.
Quick Play for Chrome
Quick Play bundles all eight games and their sequential levels in a toolbar popup and new-tab page. Scores stay in the extension, separate from the website. It requests no permissions and makes no background requests.
The next extension release is being prepared. A verified Chrome Web Store install link will appear here once it is published. You can play every game on this website now.
Play the games