MindForge: Brain Training

Four games, no wifi, no account, no ads. Two are our own: match a numeral across two writing systems, or sweep the tiles the light misses. Open source.

MindForge is a small collection of brain-training games that runs entirely on your phone. Two of the four are the app's own — built on things this app had to solve anyway, and not found elsewhere.

FOUR GAMES

Digit Bridge. The same number, written in two different numbering systems. One side shows it in the digits you read; the other shows it in the digits you don't. Find the match among six candidates, where the wrong ones are near-misses: a transposition, a substituted digit, a reordering. It exists because this app already had to render Latin and Eastern Arabic numerals side by side, and it turns that into the question.

False Light. One imaginary light falls on the whole board. Most tiles stand raised under it; a few are pressed flat. Sweep the pressed ones before the field resets. There is no text and no colour on this board at all — depth is the only channel — so it plays identically for everyone, and identically in every language.

Stroop Rush. The word "BLUE" is printed in red ink. Tap the colour, not the word. Your reading reflex fires first and you have to override it, and that override is the whole exercise. A streak multiplier rewards holding your nerve.

Schulte Grid. The numbers 1 to 25, scattered across a five-by-five board. Tap them in order, as fast as you can. Fix your gaze on the centre tile and hunt with your peripheral vision.

Each runs at three difficulties, and each difficulty keeps its own personal best, so a Blitz record never overwrites the Chill run you were proud of.

NO NETWORK CODE AT ALL

Not "we don't sell your data". There is nothing in this app that can reach the internet: no HTTP client, no socket, no remote config, no fonts fetched at runtime. Nothing can be sent because there is nothing to send it with.

So there is no account, no sign-up, no ads, no in-app purchases, no analytics and no crash reporting. Your scores live in one database file on your device.

MindForge is open source under the Apache License 2.0, which means that claim is checkable by reading the code rather than something you have to take on trust.

PLAYABLE WITHOUT COLOUR VISION

In a game whose entire mechanic is naming colours, colour-blind support is a correctness requirement rather than a preference.

Every Stroop answer key carries a fill pattern as well as a colour — solid, diagonal stripes, dots, concentric rings — and the stimulus word repeats its own pattern in ink. You can play the whole game by matching patterns and never discriminate a colour at all. The patterns are always on. There is no setting to find. False Light goes further: it carries no colour information whatsoever.

Settings also offers a colour-blind-friendly palette, which changes the colours a round is generated from, not merely how they are painted.

FOUR LANGUAGES, TWO RIGHT-TO-LEFT

English, German, Persian and Kurdish Sorani.

Right-to-left is not a mirrored stylesheet applied at the end. Every inset, alignment and text direction is written directionally, so the layout is correct by construction. Persian and Kurdish also render Eastern Arabic numerals, which matters more here than in most apps: in Schulte Grid the numerals are the game, and in Digit Bridge the two systems are the question.

ALSO IN THE BOX

A Daily Mix that picks your session so you can start training without deciding anything first. A streak that counts the days you showed up. Stats holding your personal bests, games played, total time trained and a chart of recent runs. VoiceOver labels throughout, Dynamic Type support, and a reduce-motion setting that collapses animation to zero rather than merely shortening it.

A NOTE ON WHAT THIS IS

MindForge is a game. It is not a medical device, a diagnostic tool or a treatment. It makes no claim that playing it will improve your memory, attention, intelligence or academic performance, or that it will prevent or delay cognitive decline. Your score measures how you did in this app, and nothing further.