Double Take

Double Take is a free online spot the difference game, which some people call find the difference. Two copies of a bright, flat illustrated scene sit side by side on a computer or stacked on a phone, and the second one is not quite the same: a teapot points the other way, a cake has one candle too many, a mug changed colour, a bottle grew, a fruit bowl vanished. Find all five differences in each scene, then do it again in the next one: a kitchen, a busy street, a garden, the bottom of the sea and a cluttered desk, five scenes in all on one two-minute clock. It plays in your browser with no download and no sign-up, on mobile and PC.

Every scene hides exactly one difference of each kind: something missing, a different colour, a different size, something mirrored and a changed detail, like one more book on the shelf or a round clock that turned square. Tap a difference on either picture and a red felt-tip ring draws itself around it on both. Find all five and the scene is stamped clear with a speed bonus, and the next one slides in at once. Nothing is ever pointed out for you: the game never circles a difference on its own, however long you look.

What makes it hard is the clock and the price of a guess. A wrong tap costs 100 points and 5 seconds of the clock, and taps pause for a second, so tapping everywhere is the fastest way to run out of time. Truly stuck? Press HINT (or H on a keyboard): it circles one difference in yellow, scores nothing for it and costs 100 points, and you get three hints per game. The differences are dealt fairly: every scene of every game has the same five kinds of change, each one big enough to see on a phone and spread over different parts of the picture, and a colour change always differs in brightness too, so it shows up even for colour-blind players. That makes every run equally hard and turns the leaderboard into a test of sharp eyes, not luck.

Each difference you find is worth 100 points, and every cleared scene adds a bonus of 100 plus up to 300 more for speed: clear a scene in 10 seconds and the bonus is 300. Find all 25 differences before the clock runs out to post a full clear. The fastest-clear board ranks the real time a clear took: there a miss costs its one-second pause, while the 5 seconds it takes off the clock shorten the time you have left to finish. Top scores are verified by replaying your taps on our servers, so every score on the board is real, and like all our quick games a run lasts two minutes at most.

On a phone, tap the difference on the top or the bottom picture and the HINT button under your thumb; on a computer, click it on the left or the right one and press H for a hint. That is the whole control scheme, which makes Double Take one of the easiest brain games to pick up and one of the best free games to play at work on a short break. Want more puzzles for sharp eyes? Browse the puzzle games category, or try Lost & Found, a giant hidden object map that everyone hunts at the same time.