Rhythm Rhyme

Rhythm Rhyme is a free online rhythm memory game set in a 1970s AM radio studio. The station plays a sound cart exactly once: a knock at the door, a doorbell, a drum fill, a short word in Morse code or a playground clapping game. Then the MIC LIVE lamp comes on and you tap the rhythm back on one big button, and every tap plays the cart's own sounds in order: knocks for the knock, the ding and the dong of the doorbell, each drum of the fill, the Morse beeps, the pats and claps of the clapping game. Like the rhyme of a clapping game, the pattern is yours to echo back, so a good take sounds just like the cart. It is a quick test of how well you can repeat a rhythm you have only heard once, it runs in your browser with no download, and a day's five rhythms take about a minute, which makes it one of our favorite quick games and timing games.

Every day brings five rhythms, and they get harder. The first is a few unhurried knocks on a door, an easy warm-up for anyone. Then comes a doorbell's ding-dong tune with one quick pair, a seven-hit drum fill in fast sixteenths, a familiar word in Morse code whose dots and dashes you only hear in the spacing of the beeps, and finally a two-bar clapping game of pats, claps and partner claps with the off-beats that catch people out. Each kind has well over a hundred different rhythms, all measured to be equally hard, so a rhythm you heard today will not come back for more than four months. Each rhythm plays with sound and with a pulse you can see, the needle of the studio's VU meter and a blip on the tape, so you can play it with the sound off too.

After each take a log sheet slides up. It shows the tape in three tracks: the original, your taps over it, and everyone's average take as a ghost track, with an arrow wherever the crowd comes in early or late and the one gap most people rush or drag. A red stamp gives your take's points out of 1,000, say 934 points, with plain notes on what happened: hits caught, extra taps, how far off you were on average and whether your tempo drifted. Everyone hears the same five rhythms each day, so you also see today's ratings, a chart of every listener's accuracy with your bar in orange and how many of them you were closer than. At the end, the station card lays out all five takes with a little tape of each, their points and your total, ready for a screenshot or the share button.

Scoring is about timing, measured per tap. Your first tap starts the take and lines it up with the rhythm, and the game forgives a steady tempo that is a little slow or fast, up to twelve percent. Every other tap is matched to its hit and scored by how far off it is: full marks within a sixtieth of a second, and nothing beyond a tenth to a fifth of a second, depending on how much room there is around the hit, so quick pairs are judged tighter than slow knocks. A tap you leave out scores nothing for its hit, and an extra tap counts against you. Each rhythm is worth up to 1,000 points, so a perfect day is 5,000, and your one go of the day goes on the leaderboards of this skill game.

Rhythm Rhyme is a one-button game that works the same on every device, and it was called Copy That until October 2026. On a phone, tap anywhere on the screen; on a computer, click or press Space, Enter or the down arrow. It is a rhythm test, a memory game for adults and a little brain game at once, and one of the mobile games and PC games that take a minute a day. If you like counting seconds in your head, try Darkroom next.