Braintide is live on the App Store. Eighty-two short brain-training games across ten mental skills, one daily workout of about six minutes, and a score that is actually comparable with last time. It works completely offline, it has no account, and it has no ads on any plan.
Ten skills, and a free game in every one
Memory, attention, processing speed, problem solving, language, flexibility, numeracy, spatial reasoning, coordination and listening. Each carries its own level from 0 to 100, and the Braintide Score is simply the average of the ten — no weighting you cannot see.
Thirteen games are free forever, at least one in every skill, so the whole of your brain can be trained without paying anything. Pro opens the other sixty-nine, plus the weekly report and the full per-skill history.
The daily workout picks what you have neglected
Three games a day by default, chosen by the skills you have left longest, so nothing goes stale. It takes about six minutes and you can set it to three, four or five games. A ten-game warm-up of about seven minutes sets your starting level, and after that the difficulty follows you rather than staying where you started — the engine holds you near the edge of what you can do, at roughly 78% success.
Your streak survives one missed day and ends on two. The home screen says so, rather than letting you find out.
The checkpoint, and why it exists
Here is the problem every brain trainer has and few of them mention. An adaptive engine moves the difficulty to keep you near 78% success. That is exactly right for training and useless for measuring: your score hovers while the difficulty climbs underneath it, and you cannot tell improvement from a harder question set.
So Braintide has a checkpoint. The same ten short games, at the same fixed difficulty, every fourteen days, never fed back into your levels. It is the only figure in the app that can honestly be compared with last time, and the checkpoint screen says as much before you start — including that it will feel easy, and that this is the point.
Every task says where it came from
Each game opens with a brief: how to play in three steps, the task it descends from, and a sentence on what the skill actually is. Stroop from the Stroop task. Sequence Recall from Corsi block-tapping. Dual N-Back from dual n-back, with two independent streams rather than one.
Braintide is a game. It trains focus and memory for fun. It is not a medical device, it makes no claim to diagnose, treat or prevent any condition, and it shows no percentile, brain age or ranking against other people — because it has no data about other people and will not invent any.
More than tapping
Most brain trainers are a tap and a swipe. Braintide asks you to tap, flick, drag, draw, turn a dial, spell a word from letter tiles, type a number, and — in five games — make a sound. Three games have no options at all: Set It Straight and Wind Back are scored on how many degrees you were off, On the Mark on how many milliseconds.
Where to get it
Braintide is on the App Store now, in twelve languages. The Android build is going through Google Play's closed testing first, so it will follow rather than land alongside — the product page will carry the Play link the day it opens.