Spot the Difference

How to play Spot the Difference

Spot the Difference puts two versions of the same scene side by side — a house, a hillside, a harbour, a night sky, whatever the seed draws this round — and hides a handful of changes between them. Every scene is generated fresh from an original library of about thirty simple shapes (houses, trees, clouds, animals, boats, balloons and more), so no two rounds ever look alike and nothing is copied from anywhere. Your job is to find every difference by tapping or clicking the exact spot where the two pictures disagree, in either picture. A timer runs the whole time and every wrong click costs points, so this is equal parts sharp eyes and steady nerves.

The goal

Find all of the hidden differences — 5 on Easy, 7 on Medium, 10 on Hard — while keeping your score as high as possible. There is no way to fail the round outright: mistakes never end the game, they just cost points, so you can always keep hunting until every difference is found. The real challenge is finishing with a clean pair of eyes and a light touch on the wrong-click counter.

The two scenes

Pick a difficulty and the game builds a scene of 15 to 25 elements — houses, trees, hills, clouds, a sun or moon, birds, flowers, boats, fish, stars, balloons, fences and more — scattered across a square canvas with a seeded random generator. Scene B starts as an exact copy of Scene A, and then exactly the right number of differences is stamped onto it: one of colour, removal, mirroring, resizing or repositioning, applied to a different element each time. The two scenes sit large and side by side on a wide screen, or stacked one above the other on a phone, so there is always plenty of room to compare them closely.

How to play

• Compare the two scenes carefully — look at colours, shapes, sizes, positions, and whether every object is even still there.
• When you spot a change, tap or click that exact location in EITHER scene — you never need to click both.
• A correct find locks in a green ring marker on both scenes at once, so you always know what you have already found.
• A miss flashes a small red cross where you tapped and counts as a wrong click — it never ends the round, but it does cost points, so aim before you tap.
• The round ends the instant every difference for the chosen difficulty is found; your time and wrong-click count are then turned into your final score.

The five kinds of difference

• Colour change — an object is repainted a different, clearly distinct shade from its own palette.
• Removed — an object present in Scene A is simply missing from Scene B.
• Mirrored — an object is flipped horizontally, facing the opposite way.
• Resized — an object grows or shrinks by at least 25%, always staying big enough to spot.
• Moved — an object is relocated by at least 8% of the canvas, so it never just nudges a hair to one side.

How scoring works

Your score starts at a base of 8,000 points. Every second on the clock costs 10 points, and every wrong click costs 200 points — there is no free pass on mistakes, so a careless guess is worth exactly as much as 20 seconds of careful looking. The score never drops below 1 and is capped at 99,999. Example: finishing a Medium round (7 differences) in 90 seconds with 2 wrong clicks scores 8000 − 900 − 400 = 6,700. Because 200 points is a real chunk of the budget, it almost always pays to look a little longer before you tap rather than guess and hope.

Daily Challenge

Press Daily Challenge to play the one puzzle everyone in the world gets for your chosen difficulty on today's UTC date — the seed is generated from the calendar date itself, so it is identical for every player until the date rolls over, then a brand-new daily puzzle appears. It is a great way to compare notes and times with friends on the exact same pair of scenes, on top of the unlimited fresh rounds New Round gives you any time.

Tips for finding differences faster

• Scan in a fixed pattern — top-left to bottom-right, one horizontal strip at a time — instead of letting your eyes wander. A systematic sweep catches subtle recolours that a random glance misses.
• Check silhouettes, not just colours. A mirrored object often keeps the same colour and size as its twin, so its outline — which way a boat's sail leans, which side a bird's beak points — is the real tell.
• Sky first, ground second. Splitting the scene into two passes (everything above the horizon, then everything below) keeps your attention from bouncing around and re-scanning the same busy areas.
• When a spot looks "almost right," trust that instinct and look again — most missed differences are subtle 25%-scale resizes rather than dramatic changes, so a nagging feeling is often exactly correct.
• Slow down after a wrong click rather than tapping again in frustration — at 200 points a mistake, two rushed guesses in the same area cost more than 40 extra seconds of careful looking would have.

Frequently asked questions