Spot

Puzzle · plays in your browser, no download

A traffic jam, a football match, a crowded beach, a classroom: two pictures that look the same, and a few things that are not. Tap them on either picture.

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Where it comes from

Spot-the-difference is a newspaper puzzle older than the crossword page it usually sat on: two drawings printed next to each other, with a line under them saying how many changes to look for. It moved to arcade cabinets in the 1990s and to phones after that, and the rule never changed: look at both, and trust nothing.

How to play

Two pictures that look the same. They are not: some things have changed.
Tap a difference on either picture. A green ring marks it on both.
A thing can be gone, swapped, moved, bigger or new. If it moved, its old place counts too.
The number at the bottom says how many you have found and how many there are.
Every star is five pictures in a row — the five little bars at the top. Find them all without a wrong tap and the star counts as perfect: that is the yellow number.

What makes this one different

Two pictures side by side, and a few things that changed between them. The trick is that they really are the same picture: every difference is one the game made on purpose and knows about, so a thing you can see is always a thing you can tap — and nothing is ever hiding behind something else.

Six real places, built fresh every time: a traffic jam with the cars in their lanes, a busy street, a children’s football match, an afternoon fishing off a jetty, a crowded beach and a classroom at their desks. Things go missing, swap for something of the same kind, move to an empty place, grow or turn up new. More stars puts more on the picture and hides more changes, and from four stars on wrong taps run out.

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